jay@isis.UUCP (Jay Batson) (10/27/86)
[ Line eater? What line eaCHOMP!
Here's one for all you ATT hardware advocates out there.
I am considering buying a new system for my house. I
have a UNIX-68000 super-micro I work on at my job, and
I often use a Pyramid 90x with it's wonderful DualPort
OSx (SVR2 and 4.2) UNIX. But from home, I work at 1200
baud, and I'm getting too old to wait for 'vi' to paint
a screen while I work late at night.
Soooo, I'm now in the market. I think I've narrowed my
choices down to ATT products for one simple reason - I
think like 'corporate america', and I want the company
behind the product as much as the product itself. And
since Big Blue doesn't have the commitment to UNIX that
ATT does, I'm down to a choice between two products:
- the 6300+ with (the "full" (damn you ATT)) Simul-task
and MS/DOS, or
- the UNIX-PC (a/k/a 7300) or it's kin, the 3B1,
with MS/DOS and a co-processor.
Thoughts at large that will be important in my decision
are as follows. Although I program in C all day every day,
all my work is text/database oriented. I _crave_ exploring
the graphics connection. I'd love to dig into GKS stuff &etc,
and write myself some nifty things I want to play with.
I'd like what I write to be fairly portable, so any utilities
I purchase for my home system should be something I could
purchase for, say, a Sun (slather, drool!!) or uVax II at
some time later. Next, I _loathe_ having to live with small hard
discs, and _hate!hate!hate!_ backups to floppy. I'll make
an investment in a streamer QUICKLY!, so I'd hope the system
chosen would be popular enough that there will be some choices
for tape backup systems. And I 'ain't a-gonna want to write
"yet another" device driver myself in order to have it either.
In addition, I've got a couple antique CP/M machines at home
on which my wife has become addicted to "user friendly"
software. She want's to switch our personal stuff to MS/DOS,
since she uses it at work. So in deference to her desires,
we are going to limit our choices to machines that will
satisfy both of us - her MS/DOS and my UNIX. Consequently,
one fairly important possibility to be dealt with is that there
are, I'm sure, going to be times when my wife wants to run
Lotus (I hope these machines can run Lotus...),
and I'll want to be 'vi'ing, and of course, we'll both need to work
simultaneously. I'll need to be able to hang my vt220 off the back,
as well as my parallel printer. Further, I do _lots_ of on-line
stuff, so I'd like to be able to run 'cu' while we are both on it.
YES, I KNOW - I'm talking about a big load on the poor beastie,
but that's life in the big city folks, and I can't afford two boxes.
Which of these two (three) systems would you choose? Persons
advocating non ATT systems are welcome to reply, but fair
warning - I'm probably past the ATT/non-ATT choice at this
point. IN ADDITION TO my thoughts at large above, specific
comments on the following will be appreciated:
- concurrent MS/DOSing and UNIXing performance,
- compatibility of "officially supported" MS/DOS software
with UNIX - e.g. do the DOS WP programs send stuff to
the printer through the UNIX spooler so as not to crash
anything I might be printing, etc...,
- integrity of the UNIX (e.g. bugs or crippled or incomplete
utilities or ???),
- availability (through ATT or elsewhere) of good, _fairly_
inexpensive, as 'standardized' as possible device independent
graphics suites (with drivers for the box/screen),
- availability of 'mice' with a good interface between the
mouse/graphics,
- windowing interfaces available within C programs, whether
within UNIX (ala 7300) or available in aftermarket software
tools, and portability of same to non-ATT boxes,
- availability of color (score a point in the 6300+ column),
- prices of commercially available software packages - e.g.
do vendors consider the 7300/3b1 a bigger machine than the
6300+, and thus charge more for a copy of, say, Oracle?,
- as a matter of fact, the availability of Oracle is important,
- relative discounts on each to us software developers,
- your bottom line conclusion as to value of each given my
admittedly verbose criteria.
My goal for my spare time in the next months is going to be
to write a set of programs for (us) lawyers that are more than
just your standard time/billing stuff that is even available
from ATT. I want some good UNIX based large-scale-litigation
support software, and I'm gonna write me some. And I'm a-gonna
finally sit down and write a "user-friendly", screen (curses)
based backup package, with incremental backup knowledge, &etc.
After all - have you tried to manage backups on a SVR2 machine lately?
(ATT-IS - If you're reading, and want to take a look at what I
come up with, feel free to drop me a note.... (hee-hee (-:)).
This newsgroup isn't so crowded that responses can't be posted. But if
you are a net.purist, you can mail yours, and I might summarize such
mail if it differs from posted responses in significant ways.
--------
"Stop it!! Stop it now. This is getting silly again, and this silliness
has _got_ to stop. Go on to the next sketch. Go on. Turn this camera o "
Jay Batson
ihnp4!onecom!\
isis!jay
seismo!{hao,nbires}!/