When you request the PRINT SCREEN Configuration Menu from the main menu, a
screen similar to what is shown above is displayed. It tells you the
current status of your PRINT SCREEN Configuration on the first two lines
and provides a choice of things you can do in usual menu format. You make
these choices in the normal way.
If you select the first option, WUTIL is configured so that PRINT SCREEN
output is sent to your printer (attached to your printer port). This is
the initial mode.
Selecting the second option displays a prompt on the lower part of the
screen which asks you to type in the name of the file you want PRINT SCREEN
output sent to. You can enter any standard MS-DOS file specification,
including drive designations and paths. You can even specify another
special device (your COMM port, for instance), though this is probably not
usually useful.
Page 36
WUTIL VERSION 3.1 THE PRINT SCREEN FUNCTION AND CONFIGURATION MENU
The third option switches the formfeed after print mode. If WUTIL was
configured to add a formfeed after PRINT SCREEN output, this mode is turned
off. If it was set to not add a formfeed, then this mode is turned on.
Each time you make a selection, the PRINT SCREEN Configuration Menu is
redisplayed with the new current settings printed at the top of the screen.
When you have finished doing your configuration, you can press MAIN SCREEN
or select item number 4 from the menu to return to the main menu.
HOW PRINT SCREEN WORKS: CHARACTER TRANSLATIONHOW PRINT SCREEN WORKS: CHARACTER TRANSLATIONHOW PRINT SCREEN WORKS: CHARACTER TRANSLATION
When displaying things on the screen, WUTIL attempts to take full advantage
of the rich character set available on the Rainbow. This is particularly
true of the sector dump function. When a copy of the screen is requested,
either for your printer or for a file, certain compromises must be made;
the characters appearing on the screen have to be translated in many cases
to things which can be printed.
WUTIL has two modes of translation, and it picks one depending on where
your PRINT SCREEN output is going. For lack of better terminology, we'll
refer to them as "dumb printer mode" and "really dumb printer mode".
Dumb printer mode is selected by WUTIL when you have the PRINT SCREEN key_________________
configured to send output to your printer and your printer port has been ___
defined in your firmware SET-UP to receive eight-bit (rather than seven-
bit) data. When your hardware is so configured, WUTIL assumes that the
printer you have is a standard DEC printer such as an LA50, LA100, etc.
These printers do have some of the special Rainbow screen characters ____
available in their repertoire, and WUTIL tries to display these characters
as is. Those characters which cannot be displayed on DEC printers are
replaced with a special "centered dot" character.
Really dumb printer mode is selected by WUTIL when you have the PRINT________________________
SCREEN key configured to send output to a file, or in any case if your __
printer port has been defined in SET-UP to receive seven-bit data. When
your hardware is so configured, WUTIL assumes it can only use standard,
7-bit ASCII characters in its output. All characters which are not in this
set are displayed as periods.
Since WUTIL likes to draw boxes around things, and since boxes don't look
as good when built out of dots, centered or otherwise, WUTIL uses a special
mode of translation for the line-drawing characters making up the boxes it
shows on the screen. This occurs regardless of the mode WUTIL selects.
When copying any box corner (upper or lower, left or right) to the printer
or a file, WUTIL replaces it with a "+" (plus sign) character. All
horizontal lines are replaced with "-" (hyphens), and all vertical lines
are replaced with "|" (vertical bars, which are actually not the same thing
as solid vertical lines on the Rainbow screen and on most printers). The
end result is a reasonably acceptable rendition of boxes on all printers.
This is, in fact, the way all boxes appear in the screen "snapshots"
provided throughout this manual.
Page A-1
WUTIL VERSION 3.1 APPENDIX A: NON-STANDARD HARD DISK DRIVES
*********************************
* APPENDIX A *
*********************************
* NON-STANDARD HARD DISK DRIVES *
*********************************
One of the motivations for developing WUTIL was to allow you to put disk
drives in your Rainbow which may have different sizes or geometries than
the "standard" ones supplied by DEC.
When we refer to non-standard drives here, we are referring to drives which
are not geometrically equivalent to the standard Rainbow disk drives. All
standard drives supported for the Rainbow and sold by DEC are actually made
by Seagate Technology, a major manufacturer of Winchester disk drives. The
DEC model numbers and their corresponding Seagate part numbers are shown in
the table below:
Description DEC Model Number Seagate Model Number ___________ ________________ ____________________
5 MB, full height RD50 ST-506
10 MB, full height RD51 ST-412
20 MB, half height RD31 ST-225
The Seagate models, as well as models made by other manufacturers but
essentially to the same specifications, should behave identically to the
DEC models and thus are not considered "non-standard".
However, suppose you want to put a 32 Megabyte or 67 Megabyte drive in your
Rainbow? Can you do it, now that you have WUTIL? The answer is probably,
but you may have to play a few games to make it happen.
A number of people have, for instance, successfully put 32 megabyte DEC
RD52 (Quantum Q540) or 67 megabyte DEC RD53 (Micropolis 1325) drives in
their Rainbows using WUTIL as a formatting and partitioning tool. However,
using disks of this size creates some problems which WUTIL cannot entirely
solve.
BIGGER IS NOT ALWAYS BETTERBIGGER IS NOT ALWAYS BETTERBIGGER IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER
One problem WUTIL encounters is the placement of control data on the first
two tracks of the large hard disks. WUTIL is required to write several
types of data onto the disk, as summarized below:
THE PRE-BOOT BLOCK, always located in track 0, sector 1 (the first sector
on the disk) contains a small program which loads a larger secondary boot
program from the disk, which in turn loads the operating system loading
code from the auto-boot partition. The pre-boot program is supplied in
the file PREBOOT.LDX and copied here during initialization.
THE HOME BLOCK, always located in track 0, sector 2, contains information
about the disk's geometry and other physical parameters. It also contains
the location and sizes of all the other special blocks on the disk, except
for the pre-boot block and the home block itself, of course.
Page A-2
WUTIL VERSION 3.1 APPENDIX A: NON-STANDARD HARD DISK DRIVES
THE PARTITION DATA (DPD) BLOCK contains a description of the various
partitions on your disk.
THE OPERATING SYSTEM NAME (OSN) BLOCK contains the names of all the
operating systems which may have partitions on your disk.
THE BAD ADDRESS TABLE (BAT BLOCKS) contains a bit for each and every sector
on your disk; the bit indicates whether the sector is good or bad. The BAT
occupies several blocks; you need one sector of BAT information for every
250 tracks of space on your disk.
THE ALTERNATE SECTOR TABLE (AST BLOCKS) contains information about how bad
sectors on your disk are replaced with good sectors from the alternate
sector area. The AST usually occupies several blocks; it contains entries
for each of the alternate sectors available on the disk. You need one
sector of AST information for every 100 alternate sectors on your disk;
each alternate track, keep in mind, contains 16 alternate sectors.
THE SECONDARY BOOT AREA contains the secondary boot program mentioned above
(loaded by the pre-boot program). The current secondary boot program in
the SECBOOT.LDX file distributed with WUTIL occupies 12 sectors.
All of the control information listed above (including the boot code)
normally resides in the first two tracks of the disk, with duplicate copies
being stored in the third and fourth tracks. Further, DEC stipulates that,
in the case of the structures which take more than one sector (BAT, AST,
Secondary Boot), the entire sequence of blocks should fit within one track
of the disk.
Both of these become difficult for very large disks. The BAT area is the
biggest problem. If your disk has more than 4000 total tracks (cylinders
times surfaces), the BAT occupies 17 or more sectors. Since a track
contains only 16 sectors, it is impossible to write the entire BAT within
one track! The AST area can be a problem as well.
Further, if the AST and/or BAT must be placed in track 1 because they won't
fit in track 0 with the other structures, then the secondary boot code,
which normally is placed at the beginning of track 1, may have to be moved
somewhere. WUTIL moves it to track 4. If the size of the BAT area is
greater than 16 sectors, then WUTIL leaves the secondary boot code in track
1 and moves the BAT area to tracks 4, 5, and however many more are needed.
In general, there is code in WUTIL which attempts to find good places to
put these control structures for a given disk geometry. This algorithm
attempts to organize these structures so that they will match (or come very
close to) their placement by the DEC-supplied formatter for all DEC-
supported drives. But this becomes difficult for larger disks. In
general, if you have a disk much bigger than 20MB (32MB is usually the next
size up), WUTIL has to start breaking the rules. And when it does, SOME of
the standard DEC-supplied utilities start to get sick.
For instance, the MS-DOS FORMAT command needs access to the BAT area on the
disk in order to mark bad sectors in the File Allocation Table it builds in
the partition (this is true prior to version 3.10 of MS-DOS; version 3.10
and higher avoids the issue by doing a sector-by-sector test of the entire
partition during its processing). Unfortunately, FORMAT expects the BAT to
Page A-3
WUTIL VERSION 3.1 APPENDIX A: NON-STANDARD HARD DISK DRIVES
fit entirely within one track, and it gets lost when a very large BAT wraps
around from the end of one track to the beginning of another, sometimes
more than once. Then it displays a noisy message about not being able to
read the BAT and therefore it may not know where all the bad sectors are.
If you know for a fact that your disk has no bad sectors, or at least that
there are none in that partition, you may consider this acceptable.
However, if the partition you are trying to format does have bad sectors,
you should avoid using FORMAT. WUTIL does format your partition, so
reformatting should not be required. If you absolutely must reformat in a
situation like this, the best thing to do is do it with WUTIL. Use the
repartition option, and press DO immediately upon entry. WUTIL will
recognize that each partition is unchanged and will, by default, not
reinitialize it. When it gets to the one you want reformatted, tell it to
initialize the partition anyway.
OTHER PROBLEMS BEGIN TO "SURFACE"OTHER PROBLEMS BEGIN TO "SURFACE"OTHER PROBLEMS BEGIN TO "SURFACE"
Other problems come about if your disk has eight surfaces, or any number of
surfaces other than four. This can happen with very large disks, which
often have eight surfaces, or conceivably with smaller disks which may have
one or two surfaces.
Translating a track number into its component cylinder and surface numbers
requires knowing how many surfaces your disk has. Although this
information is stored in your disk's Home block, most DEC-supplied software
seems to ignore it and always assume you have four surfaces (since all the
drives they support do). Fixing this may require that you do some
patching.
As of version 2.0 of WUTIL, the number of places where patching is required
has been greatly diminished. As far as we know, there is only one place
where a patch need be applied to correct the problems caused by assuming
four surfaces on a drive. This patch is necessary to permit booting from
partitions on the hard disk.
Booting from the winchester disk consists of four distinct steps. The
first step involves Rainbow firmware (this is the part which only exists in
the Rainbow 100B). When the "W" (boot from Winchester disk) option is
chosen from the start-up menu, boot firmware code reads the primary (pre)
boot block from the hard disk and executes it. This software proceeds to
load and execute the secondary boot code (it finds it by looking for it in
the location specified in the disk's home block). The secondary boot code
determines which partition to boot from (it may display a hard disk startup
menu if no auto-boot partition is specified). Then it locates an operating
system boot loader in the first two tracks of the selected boot partition,
loads that into memory, and executes it. Finally, the operating system
boot loader loads the operating system itself and starts its execution.
Each of the four steps needs to access data on the hard disk, and thus
needs to know the correct number of surfaces on the disk in order to find
the "next piece" in succession. This is not a problem for the firmware,
since it always reads from track 0. The primary and secondary boot loaders
supplied with WUTIL also correctly read the home block to determine the
number of surfaces and access what they need to read properly. However,
the operating system boot loaders provided with CP/M, CCP/M, and MS-DOS do
Page A-4
WUTIL VERSION 3.1 APPENDIX A: NON-STANDARD HARD DISK DRIVES
not perform this calculation correctly, and can therefore fail to complete
the boot process (the operating systems themselves, fortunately, DO use the
correct number of surfaces, so only the boot loaders need to be fixed).
In previous versions of the WUTIL manual, we provided steps for manually
patching existing boot loaders. Fortunately, this is no longer required,
due to the existence now of a fine public-domain disk preparation utility
called DSKPREP. Its author, Herbert Hofmann, has produced an excellent
package which will build proper operating system loaders for all three
Rainbow operating systems. You are strongly encouraged to seek out DSKPREP
(it should generally be available anywhere where you find WUTIL) and use
it. It comes with complete documentation describing its features (it has
many others in addition to the one mentioned here) and is indispensable if
you wish to use a drive with anything other than four heads.
Please note, that it is not necessary to use DSKPREP on MS-DOS V3.10 parti-
tions.
DO YOU SCARE EASILY?DO YOU SCARE EASILY?DO YOU SCARE EASILY?
With a little work, you should be able to solve all the problems and make
your big or otherwise non-standard disks work. But remember that nothing
good comes for free, and you may have to work for a while and get your
fingernails dirty. This is not a task for the faint at heart, nor for the
faint at hardware. The existence of advanced tools like WUTIL and DSKPREP
make the whole process much easier than it used to be, but it is still
advisable to understand some of what is going on -- this is not the sort of
upgrade you can reasonably expect to just "plug in and use".
Page B-1
WUTIL VERSION 3.1 APPENDIX B: COMMON QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
******************************
* APPENDIX B *
******************************
* COMMON QUESTIONS & ANSWERS *
******************************
Since WUTIL's first release, I have received a number of questions from
users. In the section which follows, I have tried to include a represen-
tation of the more common questions and their answers, as best as I can
supply them. Scan the list below; you may find the answers to things
you've been wondering about!
ou've
ou've
---
QUESTION: I JUST PICKED UP A SUPERMEGADISK MODEL 999-XXX AT A LOCAL SWAPQUESTION: I JUST PICKED UP A SUPERMEGADISK MODEL 999-XXX AT A LOCAL SWAPQUESTION: I JUST PICKED UP A SUPERMEGADISK MODEL 999-XXX AT A LOCAL SWAP
MEET. NOW THAT I HAVE WUTIL, CAN I FORMAT IT, PARTITION IT, AND USE IT?MEET. NOW THAT I HAVE WUTIL, CAN I FORMAT IT, PARTITION IT, AND USE IT?MEET. NOW THAT I HAVE WUTIL, CAN I FORMAT IT, PARTITION IT, AND USE IT?
Well, that depends on a number of things. First and foremost, it is
important that you have specifications for the drive. You must, at a
minimum, know how many cylinders and surfaces the drive has. Without this
information, the drive will be useless (to anyone!).
The next thing you must check is that the drive is electrically compatible
with your Rainbow. You are fortunate here, because most drives probably
will be. Virtually all 5 1/4 inch Winchester drives built today are
compatible with the "Seagate ST506/ST412 Interface", which dictates not
only the number and shape of connectors, but what signals are assigned to
what pins. A reasonable rule of thumb is to look at the connectors and see
if they look like the ones on the end of the cables from your hard disk
controller and power supply. If they fit, your drive is probably
compatible, though actual specs would be the best way to check (and avoid
blowing up your controller board).
Be sure you have sufficient power to handle the drive. If your system is a
Rainbow 100B, or if you had a Rainbow 100A and bought a hard disk upgrade
from DEC, you should have a fairly hefty power supply which can handle most
hard disks which can be installed inside the Rainbow cabinet. Most
internal drives made today actually draw less power than the 10MB Seagate
ST412 (DEC RD51) drive. Really big disks, however, may need to be
installed externally with a separate power supply.
One final thing to check on. The capacity of your drive may not be what
you think it is. Some drives are advertised using their "unformatted"
capacity, which is usually at least 20% larger than their actual formatted
capacity. Even when a formatted drive capacity is advertised, you have to
be careful. The rainbow will store only 16 sectors on each track of the
hard disk. Many drive capacities are measured using an IBM-standard 17
sectors per track. Some even achieve high capacities by permitting
recording 25 or more sectors per track. This is all well and good, but the
Rainbow, because of some fairly specific code in its operating systems, is
limited to 16 sectors per track, period. There is nothing preventing you
from using a drive which is specified at 25 sectors per track, but you'll
only be able to use 16 of those 25 sectors. So to determine the actual ______
drive capacity you will get on your Rainbow, use this formula:
Capacity = (Number of Cylinders) x (Number of Heads) x 8K bytes
And remember that 1 MB is 1024K bytes, not 1000K bytes.
Page B-2
WUTIL VERSION 3.1 APPENDIX B: COMMON QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
---
QUESTION: I INSTALLED A DRIVE, AND IT SEEMS TO WORK SOMETIMES, BUT OTHERQUESTION: I INSTALLED A DRIVE, AND IT SEEMS TO WORK SOMETIMES, BUT OTHERQUESTION: I INSTALLED A DRIVE, AND IT SEEMS TO WORK SOMETIMES, BUT OTHER
TIMES IT GETS LOTS OF FUNNY WRITE ERRORS AND SEEK ERRORS. AM I DOINGTIMES IT GETS LOTS OF FUNNY WRITE ERRORS AND SEEK ERRORS. AM I DOINGTIMES IT GETS LOTS OF FUNNY WRITE ERRORS AND SEEK ERRORS. AM I DOING
SOMETHING WRONG?SOMETHING WRONG?SOMETHING WRONG?
Maybe. Here are a few things to check:
(1) Make sure you specified the correct number of cylinders and heads when
you initialized your disk. You might also try a slower step rate if the
only problems you have are seek errors.
(2) Virtually all drives come with jumpers or switches of some kind which
are used to configure the drive. Sometimes, these drives come from the
factory (or wherever) with these jumpers/switches set the wrong way. In
general, you want to set the jumper for "Drive Select 1" (may be labelled
"DS 1" or even just "1" on your drive) -- AND NOTHING ELSE. If you have
extra jumpers installed or extra switches turned on, you probably want to
remove the jumpers or turn off the extra switches. Drive Select 1 should
be the only option you select.
(3) The mounting hardware for the hard drive in your Rainbow was designed
primarily for RD50 and RD51 (Seagate ST506 and ST412) drives. If you
compare these drives with most others, you may notice that the drive
electronics of other drives are a great deal closer to the bottom of the
drive. When mounted on the sliding "plate" used to install the drive in
the Rainbow cabinet, these electronics (sometimes the "foil" side of the
circuit board) often sit dangerously close to the sheet metal piece
attached to this plastic mounting plate. This can short out part of the
drive's electronics and cause "flaky" behavior. If you have such a drive,
it's a good idea to remove the metal piece from this mounting plate (it is
attached by a single small screw).
(4) Be sure that the connectors on the end of the cable from the controller
are completely and firmly installed on the drive's PC edge connectors.
Some drives do not fit well in the Rainbow cabinet and the connectors can
be forced into positions which result in improper contact.
---
QUESTION: I HAVE A RAINBOW 100A AND WOULD LIKE TO BOOT FROM MY HARD DISK.QUESTION: I HAVE A RAINBOW 100A AND WOULD LIKE TO BOOT FROM MY HARD DISK.QUESTION: I HAVE A RAINBOW 100A AND WOULD LIKE TO BOOT FROM MY HARD DISK.
IS THERE ANY WAY I CAN DO THIS?IS THERE ANY WAY I CAN DO THIS?IS THERE ANY WAY I CAN DO THIS?
You can come very close. Obtain a copy of the DSKPREP program mentioned in
appendix A. One of the functions this program provides is the ability to
create a bootable floppy disk which simulates the firmware's part of the
"boot from W" option available on the 100B start-up screen. You can create
one of these floppy disks, then just leave it, say, in drive B. When you
want to boot from your hard disk, you boot from drive B instead -- this
loads the special code from the floppy, which in turn starts the hard disk
boot procedure as if you had the "W" option on your menu. And it's more
than reasonably fast.
Page B-3
WUTIL VERSION 3.1 APPENDIX B: COMMON QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
---
QUESTION: WHY ARE PARTITIONS LIMITED TO 8 MEGABYTES?QUESTION: WHY ARE PARTITIONS LIMITED TO 8 MEGABYTES?QUESTION: WHY ARE PARTITIONS LIMITED TO 8 MEGABYTES?
This is not a limitation of WUTIL -- it is a limitation of the operating
systems and their disk allocation schemes. WUTIL simply enforces this
limit. The limit exists for CP/M and CCP/M and, for a different
reason, in MS-DOS prior to version 3.10. V 3.10 (and later) of MS-DOS rai-
ses this limit (for MS-DOS partitions only) to just under 32 megabytes.
---
QUESTION: IS WUTIL COMPATIBLE WITH OTHER DISK FORMATTING AND PARTITIONINGQUESTION: IS WUTIL COMPATIBLE WITH OTHER DISK FORMATTING AND PARTITIONINGQUESTION: IS WUTIL COMPATIBLE WITH OTHER DISK FORMATTING AND PARTITIONING
UTILITIES?UTILITIES?UTILITIES?
Generally, the answer should be yes. Some older versions had difficulties
in this area, owing mostly to (honest) deficiencies in the other utilities,
which were either writing things incorrectly so that WUTIL could not read
them or which expected certain things to be written in specific places
where WUTIL did not (and did not have to) write them. WUTIL has been made
more lenient of late, and it now attempts to place key disk structures in
the fixed places some of these utilities expect them in order to cooperate
better with other utilities. One disk utility known to be incompatible
with WUTIL is FDISK, the partitioning utility supplied with MS-DOS V3.10.
---
QUESTION: WHEN I PARTITION MY 67MB DRIVE WITH WUTIL, IT ONLY SEEMS TO GIVEQUESTION: WHEN I PARTITION MY 67MB DRIVE WITH WUTIL, IT ONLY SEEMS TO GIVEQUESTION: WHEN I PARTITION MY 67MB DRIVE WITH WUTIL, IT ONLY SEEMS TO GIVE
ME ABOUT 64MB OF SPACE, YET MY BRAND X PARTITIONING PROGRAM GIVES ME THEME ABOUT 64MB OF SPACE, YET MY BRAND X PARTITIONING PROGRAM GIVES ME THEME ABOUT 64MB OF SPACE, YET MY BRAND X PARTITIONING PROGRAM GIVES ME THE
FULL 67MB. WHAT GIVES?FULL 67MB. WHAT GIVES?FULL 67MB. WHAT GIVES?
Brand X is lying to you. WUTIL uses the industry-accepted "correct" value
of 1 megabyte in all its measurements -- the value is two to the twentieth
power, or 1K times 1K, or, to be precise, 1,048,576 bytes (given that 1K
bytes is 1,024 bytes). Some other utilities (sadly, including some from
DEC) use incorrect values like 1,024,000 or 1,000,000 in their
measurements. Some even use a different value for 1MB depending on which
drive you have, so that they can force the results to add up to the
commonly advertised capacity of the drive. Would I lie about a thing like
that? No.
---
QUESTION: IN MY DRIVE LITERATURE, IT SAYS I CAN DAISY-CHAIN SEVERAL HARDQUESTION: IN MY DRIVE LITERATURE, IT SAYS I CAN DAISY-CHAIN SEVERAL HARDQUESTION: IN MY DRIVE LITERATURE, IT SAYS I CAN DAISY-CHAIN SEVERAL HARD
DISK DRIVES TOGETHER FOR INCREASED STORAGE. CAN I?DISK DRIVES TOGETHER FOR INCREASED STORAGE. CAN I?DISK DRIVES TOGETHER FOR INCREASED STORAGE. CAN I?
Not with the DEC controller board. Although this is supported by hard
disks and by the controller chip which makes up the heart of DEC's
controller, the necessary support electronics to make this feature work
have been omitted from the board. However, you can daisy-chain two hard
disk drives together, if you replace your DEC controller board with a Micro
CHS dual winchester controller board.
---
QUESTION: DOES WUTIL LET ME CHANGE THE DIRECTORY SIZE FOR A CCP/MQUESTION: DOES WUTIL LET ME CHANGE THE DIRECTORY SIZE FOR A CCP/MQUESTION: DOES WUTIL LET ME CHANGE THE DIRECTORY SIZE FOR A CCP/M
PARTITION?PARTITION?PARTITION?
Sorry, no. Maybe in the next version. It's still probably better support
for CCP/M than you get from DEC or Digital Research.
WUTIL VERSION 3.1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ________________
WUTIL was no small undertaking, and as much as I'd like to take complete
and total credit for making this project work, I had a great deal of help
from others. Various people have helped along the way, and it would be a
tremendous injustice if I neglected to mention some of them.
Throughout the development of the first versions of this software, I
received frequent help, suggestions, and information from members of the
CompuServe DEC PC Forum. Every member of that group helped get this
project off the ground, if for no other reason, because they all put up
with constant messages about WUTIL and its predecessor, PRPART, on their
board. I also uploaded a fair number of "beta test versions" there in
WUTIL's early days, keeping the Sysops, Stu Fuller and Bill Leeman, busy
moving them around.
Martin Ferguson and Hank Suzukawa helped me test the "final final beta test
version" of WUTIL extensively and under a variety of conditions. Between
them, I was able to work out most of the bugs prior to the release of WUTIL
version 1.0. Both of these guys sat through more than a couple backups and
restores in the name of helping me get WUTIL running. Despite this, they
both offerred continual assistance and pages of detailed test reports.
Chris Walther helped a great deal with some basic research during the early
stages of WUTIL's development. He saved me more than a little time by
tracking down the way certain things worked and didn't work.
Stu Fuller and Tom Kemnitz provided additional and timely testing support.
Dan Kinoy and Ted Needleman both offered specific assistance which I turned
down, having already made other arrangements, but the offer of help was
certainly appreciated.
Bernie Eiben, the guy who runs the MARKET "board", probably the largest
source of free Rainbow (and other) software (in addition to holding down a
full time "real" job at DEC), provided invaluable assistance in working the
bugs out of WUTIL, and acted as a conduit of information between me and a
large group of Rainbow users, many of whom work inside DEC and know more
about the Rainbow than some of us outsiders will ever know. He provided
many useful suggestions and has been a big WUTIL "booster".
Mark Bornstein, in addition to providing regular ego-boosting pats on the
back, has loaned me hardware on a couple of occasions which helped me get
WUTIL working reliably on really big disks.
And, of course, there are probably others who I forgot. If you're one of
them, please accept my apologies. My brain has always had a few bad