Ryan Russell/SYBASE wrote:

If I may offer another opinion... I ran a BBS for about three years straight off of floppies on an Apple ][+, without any hardware failures or disk problems.

[snip] I can't argue against someone else's personal experience, but, if you are asking me to believe that the rather cheaply made Apple II would perform nearly as long and reliably as an HP-86/87 (for example), when making hundreds of thousands (millions?) of accesses to floppies over a period of weeks or months, without a disk drive tuneup or alignment, then I must be living in the wrong reality, i.e., everything performs the same, regardless of its construction design. SHOCK TIME: I'm going to shock you now, by telling you that of all the HP computer gear I have bought, the failure rate of new computers and major peripherals was approximately 40%, within the initial one-year warranty period. Actually, the failure rate within 90 days was well over 30%. When I wrote out the detailed list and sent it to corp. HQ, they must have peed their pants, judging by the reaction I got. Surprised? So how do I justify this? All I really know for sure, besides what I've told you, is when the initial fixes are made, I can run heavy- duty operations for many times longer without interruption than I possibly could with most other brands. Wanna know who the worst offenders are in consumer electronics, not only when it comes to warranty-period failures, but failures soon after, due to shoddy failure-proofing? Sony and Toshiba. I haven't had a lot of Toshiba equipment, but the experiences I've had, and the attitude of the company for not fixing them, are convincing for me (just my opinion). I have had a *lot* of Sony stuff, mostly small (but fairly expensive) items, and their product quality is abysmal, excepting large items such as TVs, or a couple of small "professional" items such as the Walkman D6C cassette recorder (Stereophile's favorite) and their pilot's radios S??-70 and -80.