Making APC 500 Back UPS (basic) work with FreeBSD

[Donald J. O'Neill]

On Wednesday 22 February 2006 05:07, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Donald J.
> >O'Neill
> >Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2006 8:47 AM
> >To: Chuck Swiger
> >Cc: manish jain; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> >Subject: Re: Making APC 500 Back UPS (basic) work with FreeBSD
> >
> >
> >
> >Then, thats got to be a really old, old one. I've been working
> > (playing with actually) with computers since the color computer. I
> > won't admit to anything further back than that. I've never seen one
> > that didn't have some means of communication (monitoring). Not from
> > APC anyway.
>
> APC has made a lot of older BackUPSs that didn't have the com port
> that date back to the Color Computer days, you just wern't paying
> attention.  For example the BackUPS 200VA (that unit was discontinued
> years ago) didn't have one, neither did the BackUPS 250 and 300 VA
> units from that era.  (all of those are discontinued)  However the
> models that didn't have the com port back in the olden days, were all
> very low, low VA units, under 350VA.
>
> It wasn't until modern times that APC decided to screw it all up.
>
> Ted

Bill Gates had come out with: you can't do multi-user, multitasking with 
an 8 bit micro-processor. Here was this inexpensive computer from Radio 
Shack, already on the market, that would if you used OS9, also 
available from Radio Shack. About that time, I decided that Bill Gates 
aught to pay more attention to what was going on.

At that time, my concern with, and about, power backup units was 
somewhere between none and none. I did know what one was, what it did, 
and why it was desirable to have one. I just didn't really have a need 
for one for a long time. After all, if you shutoff the PC, who cared if 
the power went down - as long as you shut down before that happened.

As to your last statement, I'm wondering if you were saying, in a 
different way: they took a nice, simple piece of equipment, that did 
its job well, and added capabilities to it, that in order to utilize 
them, required more capabilities added to the units they were supplying 
power backup to. Ah, I see by your later post to the list & OP, given 
more in depth and with good advice, that's what you meant. 

Don