lauren%RAND-UNIX@vortex.UUCP (01/17/84)
From: Lauren Weinstein <vortex!lauren@RAND-UNIX> While I cannot claim to be completely unbiased on this issue, I might point out that having UUCP support in the Interactive PC/Unix will be of limited value except for direct FTP'ing, at least compared with multi-user implementations such as Coherent. The reason is pretty simple -- if you plan to be a Usenet node or have any reasonable amount of traffic, you really want that dialup line to be ready at all times for incoming UUCP calls, and not only usable for incoming UUCP logins when you're not otherwise using the machine. My MSDOS UUCP will of course have such a limitation (until MSDOS 3.0 comes out, anyway) but the Coherent version does not -- at any given time I am usually working on the machine or reading mail while UUCP calls are pretty continuously coming in. Of course, on a single-user system (like Interactive's, so we're told) you could always use UUCP for ftp type operations and outgoing calls... but for $900 I'd expect much more, especially when much cheaper multi-user systems are available. I still suspect that the Interactive Unix is going to be pretty large in the kernel and disk use size areas, which probably explains why the docs make it clear that additional disk and memory are needed for many applications. A couple of other goodies I'm working on for Coherent currently are a version of RCS (who needs SCCS when you've got RCS?) and modifications to the Emacs-clone running on Coherent to drive the PC screen directly as well as the existing internal and full termcap supports. --Lauren--