barryg@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Barry Gold) (01/29/85)
We've had a Fortune 32:16 (68000-based) for a year now and are VERY satisfied. We got the single-user system. (I've heard the multi-user may not serve quite as many users as Fortune originally claimed.) The Fortune has an extensive menu system for non-hackers, which is easy to get around -- and one of the easiest to use/least confusing word processing systems I've ever heard of. And at a stroke of a key at the Global Menu, you can leave the entire menu system behind you and enter UNIX (tm) itself: Version 7, 4.1bsd with some Fortune enhancements. (DR. DOBBS recently called Fortune's 1.7 release operating system one of the most robust released. Certainly we've never managed to crash it significantly (i.e. beyond the ability of fsck to repair). We've got Fortune:Word 1.1 with extra features of Spell/ToC/Index/Windows plus the so-called Advanced Glossary which is actually a C-like macro programming language. We've got VTE which enables the machine to act as a virtual VT100 for modem purposes (which is how I'm using it now). We've got Development Utilities (which completes the stripped down operating system with stuff like nroff and vi and grep and all the commands real programmers need. We've also got C, so we can import and compile programs. Oh yes, and Multiplan for spread-sheeting. In addition to the Fortune commercial software, we've also imported KERMIT and the Rand Editor E17, which is copyright-abandoned. The latter needed slight debugging, accomplished by adb which revealed its ldiv routine was slightly different than the Fortune's. We changed the routine to Ldiv, which gives us the Fortune word processor, E17, and vi. The only thing we'd like (is anyone out there at FORTUNE listening) is some software that would let us read floppy text files written by other machines. AS it stands, the only way we can import stuff is by modem. --Lee Gold
fair@dual.UUCP (Erik E. Fair) (02/06/85)
Minor point: The Fortune system is NOT a UNIX look-alike; it is real UNIX
that was ported by Fortune Systems to their architecture.
Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucb-arpa.ARPA
dual!fair@BERKELEY.ARPA
{ihnp4,ucbvax,cbosgd,hplabs,decwrl,unisoft,fortune,sun,nsc}!dual!fair
Dual Systems Corporation, Berkeley, California