br@wucs.UUCP (Bill Ross) (03/06/86)
When I was an undergrad I bought an IBM pc and had lot's of fun with it. Now I do most of my work on our 4.2bsd vaxes at school. I haven't touched my pc in a year. I was looking through a recent PC WORLD and saw a 20mB disk for $450 and started thinking. I'd like to put my pc to good use but want a nice environment and good response time. I've played with PC-IX and think it's pretty aweful. Does anyone have a suggestion for a hardware/software upgrade to my pc which would make a unix hack happy? Is there a public domain csh for the pc which would make a good combination with a new harddisk? Please reply by mail. Thanks in advance.
aglew@ccvaxa.UUCP (03/08/86)
>br@wucs.UUCP writes about hardware/software upgrades to a PC that will make >a unix hack happy. At my last job I spent some time evaluating multitasking OSes for the PC. We eventually settled on a completely proprietary multitasking executive, AMS from Kadak, not because of its UNIX-like features, but because they sold complete source at a very reasonable price. Among UNIXes we looked at Coherent and Venix. Didn't like either much, mainly because of licensing costs, but also because they were just too darned slow. The most impressive of the reasonably tolerable operating systems was QNX from Quantum Software in Ottawa: small, ran in everything from 64K one drive to lovely big systems, a reasonable shell with multiple screens that you can flip between for different sessions (not quite as good as windows, but alright), and fairly easy to code for - although most of the UNIX commands and functions have changed name. Also had the nice feature of being able to run MSDOS as a sub process, but how much of MSDOS I don't know.