mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (02/18/84)
I'm new to the IBM PC game, so pardon me if this subject has been hashed into the ground. I'm considering getting a PC (or clone) to run some flavor of UNIX on. Low cost is very important. My initial impressions are that, while everybody and his dog makes a 10MB hard disk that plugs into the PC, none of them are in any way, shape, or form compatible with any of the others. (In this world of IBM plug compatibility, I'm pretty surprised at this.) They call come with a PC-DOS device driver, but for UNIX this doesn't do me a whole lot of good. Who makes the "official" XT disk for IBM? Who makes the controller? Do they sell direct, or through somebody that doesn't charge $2400 for the silly thing? Someone told me Zobex makes the controllers, but Zobex themselves (who have a terrific buy at $1100 for a 10MB disk with controller) say they don't, and they aren't software compatible either. Does anyone have any experience with running various hard disks under some flavor of UNIX? Have you written any UNIX compatible drivers? I'm also interested in performance and reliability, but it's less important than cost and compatibility. What do people think of the various Unices available for the PC? Coherent is only $500, but is apparently a subset of V7 - what I can buy today is missing UUCP, has no screen editor, and does not have termcap, termlib, or curses. And apparently it needs considerable changes to the kernel to support RAW mode in the tty driver, modem control, and the like. The good news is Coherent supports several flavors of disk. Venix looks pretty good to me, but the turkeys at UniSource won't return my phone calls or answer their phone, so I've been unable to find out which PC clones and disks they support. With this kind of support I really wonder. (Venix actually comes from VentureCom, but they claim they only support the PC/XT and nothing else. Since I've seen Venix demoed on a Compaq, this makes me wonder.) The good news is that all the software I care about is there - vi, more, csh, uucp, an ls that uses columns. The tty driver echoes ^H as _, however. PC/IX comes with Interactive's own funny editor and apparently uucp, but it doesn't exist yet, and no doubt will only support the XT, in an effort to increase IBM's sales at the expense of everybody else. I would appreciate any additional information anyone can give me. Mark Horton mark@Berkeley.ARPA mark@cbosgd.UUCP cbosgd!mark