lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (02/21/84)
Mark, I suggest you read the back archives of INFO-IBMPC for lots of information about Coherent, IX, Venix, and others. As far as Venix is concerned, it is actually a V6 system (or at least a V6 filesystem) with some V7 utilities. An odd crossbreed. Benchmarks so far place it much slower than either Coherent or IX for typical operations. The EMACS-clone editor for Coherent will be released shortly -- it uses termcap or direct code for the handling the H19 superset console emulation. Termlib and curses will be in there also. Raw mode has always worked fine. I added full modem control to allow fully flexible UUCP operations, including being able to autodial out on standard autodial modems with my new L.sys format (since I wrote my UUCP from scratch, I didn't feel constrained to be so restrictive about the way L.sys was oriented.) Internet domain handling and such will be in my mail programs as well. All of this actually works here at vortex (other than the domain stuff, which has to wait a bit until the network settles down regarding some addressing issues) and it's just a matter of getting it all back to MWC for inclusion in their official distributions... Once again, the INFO-IBMPC digest has had a wealth of information on these topics... --Lauren-- P.S. By the way, a number of different manufacturers make the hard disks in the standard XT. I use a 17 meg Miniscribe disk along with the 10 meg normal XT disk in the vortex Coherent system. The Miniscribe seems to be pretty reliable. It has "burped" twice (entering an error check diagnostic mode) but those were apparently related to power problems and caused no data loss. --LW--