dave@qtlon.UUCP (Dave Lukes) (06/12/84)
<FFFLLLAAAMMMEEE OOONNNNNNNNN !!!!!!!!!!> 1) None of you AT&T abusers actually seem to have any FACTS (remember them ? :-) to go on (please correct me if I'm wrong). The best I've heard so far is something to the effect that ``We got a demo and not all the stuff was there and the salesman didn't seem to know what he was talking about''. Can we all please remember the famous piece of advice: Engage brain before putting mouth in gear. Also: how much of this stuff is pure bigotry (whether commercially or otherwise inspired ??). 2) I don't know what the situation on 3B2 UN*X is, so I don't know how much of UN*X you don't get with it (i.e. is it just the SGS missing, or have they unbundled cat as well ? :-). 3) All this business about ``I need a C compiler/lex/yacc/franzlisp'' is all PERSONAL (REAL UN*X hacks don't need cc, they use the shell and a few handfuls of tools :-). 4) Like it or not most people using 3B2s probably WON'T need the C compiler (but probably unfortunately WILL need NROFF/DITROFF which aren't included). 5) The business about needing to recompile netnews is spurious: MOST people buy software from distributors in binary form. (Please remember that most of the world DOESN'T Have a UN*X source license and isn't interested in one.) 6) Philosophically, yes I agree that it is nasty to unbundle UN*X, but there again, lotsa good UN*X software doesn't actually come from AT&T. (Is it a UN*X system if it doesn't have netnews ??.) FFFLLLAAAMMMEEE OOOFFFFFF!!! I will now turn off the rocket engine, retire to my opium den and wait to see what AT&T have to say. From the asbestos keyboard of, Dave Lukes. (<U.K.>!ukc!qtlon!dave)
mwm@ea.UUCP (06/14/84)
#R:qtlon:-35600:ea:800003:000:637 ea!mwm Jun 14 09:18:00 1984 /***** ea:net.arch / qtlon!dave / 5:54 am Jun 12, 1984 */ 4) Like it or not most people using 3B2s probably WON'T need the C compiler (but probably unfortunately WILL need NROFF/DITROFF which aren't included). Dave Lukes. (<U.K.>!ukc!qtlon!dave) /* ---------- */ If AT&T switches to the Berkeley flavored man, with everything pre-formated, then they won't even need nroff/ditroff. Of course, not giving you man at all would have the same effect. I've got nroff/troff, and I can't get people to use it. They want a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processor. Ever tried to find a wp with the power of troff? <mike
darrelj@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Darrel VanBuer) (06/21/84)
Another WYSIWYG system with troff-like output is the Xerox Star ($13k or so
per station+$30k for 1 laser printer). If only Xerox could figure out how
to sell them.
--
Darrel J. Van Buer, PhD
System Development Corp.
2500 Colorado Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90406
(213)820-4111 x5449
...{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdccsu3,trw-unix}!sdcrdcf!darrelj
VANBUER@USC-ECL.ARPAron@brl-vgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (06/22/84)
Unfortunately Xerox Star's are also ungodly slow. Why not spend a third of that money on an IBM PC, or 1 tenth of it on an apple Macintosh. -Ron
guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris) (06/27/84)
> If AT&T switches to the Berkeley flavored man, with everything pre-formated, > then they won't even need nroff/ditroff. In System V Release 2, they did. The pre-formatted stuff is Huffman-coded with "pack(1)", so it shaves the disk space requirements by ~30%, and even with the Huffman-decoding it probably beats the living **** out of nroff, given the CPU resources nroff demands. > Of course, not giving you man at all would have the same effect. Some systems are forced to do that; they don't have enough disk space for on-line manual pages and software and user disk files. > I've got nroff/troff, and I can't get people to use it. They want a WYSIWYG > (what you see is what you get) word processor. Ever tried to find a wp > with the power of troff? Try the (probably expensive) Interleaf Office Publishing System, which is offered on the SUN and will be offered on the Cadmus workstations. It requires expensive hardware (bit-mapped display) and probably requires lots of address space, but from what I've seen it'll do everything that nroff/troff does and better. It supports multiple fonts, multiple type sizes, floating footnotes (and it reformats paragraphs and repaginates *as you type*, and keeps up with fast typing!), data-driven graphs, and free-form drawing. It uses a "structured document" approach probably closer to Scribe than to nroff/troff. WYSIWYG editors are infinitely easier to use than nroff/troff (no d*mn edit/format/check/edit/format/check cycle, or at least a much shorter one). We've got one here that does most of what you'd want nroff (sic - it doesn't do typesetting) to do, and people here use nroff only when they've got a document in nroff form already. Actually, the great 3B2/UNIX unbundling discussion really doesn't belong in net.arch; it's also being carried on in net.micro (best place) and net.followup (better than net.micro but still not 100% appropriate). Guy Harris {seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy