🚀 go-pugleaf

bonak@herky.cs.uiowa.edu (Esmail Bonakdarian) writes:

>I have an acquaintance who bought an IBM PS/1 (or 2, she's not quite sure). She
>got MS Windows and MS Works bundled with the system.

>The software was already installed and she also got the manuals - BUT she
>didn't receive any distribution disks! I think this is very strange. When I got
>MS Windows from Northgate they also sent me a set of diskettes. She  tried
>unsuccessfully to contact IBM to see if she  should have gotten the diskettes.

Since most vendors who include software with their products include 
different packages with different hardware, it isn't completely unreasonable
that a sales rep couldn't say what should have been included.

What IBM facility did she attempt to contact?  

And no, I'm not trying to defend some of the stupidities in IBM's marketing
structure.  Too many IBM sales reps still think that (a) mainframes are
IBM's only product, and (b) they don't need to know anything about what
they're selling.  At the same time, the user should be expected to know
at least what products are involved when a question is asked of a vendor.

>Anyone out there bought a PS2 or PS1 and gotten diskettes for all of the 
>installed software? What do you think about this practice of not providing 
>the software on floppies? Seems strange to me.

Other postings have noted that apparently when MS licenses a hardware 
vendor to provide software with a computer, it does not require that
the vendor include master diskettes.  Some (many?) vendors who do not
provide separate diskettes do, however, include on the fixed disk *images*
of the master diskettes which the user can copy to floppies to serve
as primary backups for later reinstallation.  Have your acquaintance
look at the directory structure: there may be some directory path
along the lines of c:\windows\dist\disk1, ...\disk2, ...\disk3 etc.

For a product like Windows, which requires the user to have the 
distribution diskettes (or their images) when adding new printers
or such, I would expect that you would find the images somewhere
on the fixed disk.

OTOH, considering the trivial cost of a set of diskettes, I look *very*
favorably on hardware vendor's ads which say "Master diskettes included".

Joe Morris