john13@garfield.UUCP (08/19/86)
[A line, a line, my kingdom for a line! - Richard the Line-Eater]
I'm posting this article in hopes of obtaining some fairly detailed responses;
they may be a mass of technical jargon to me, but then I will be forwarding
to a sysadmin, so feel free to get technical. Responses from all are greatly
appreciated, but since this relates to down-to-earth applications, the most
useful will be of the type "Yes, I've actually done what you describe."
rather than "I've heard rumours that..."
- Networking Amigas. I'm sure a lot of readers/contributors to net.amiga
have had some experiences with this sort of thing. What I need to know is the
cost per Amiga for connection to a LAN type of set-up, limitations such as
maximum number of machines per hard drive, and details which would be of
interest to a sysadmin (like seek times). If you have had experiences in this
area, I would love to hear about it. The cost for an ST system of this type is
apparently concrete, but details hard to come by for the Amiga. I'm out to
correct this imbalance.
- Amigas as graphics terminals. Another area of interest. What sort
of success have people had? Are there implementations of standard graphics
formats in the native Amiga environment? What about device drivers to
allow the Amiga to run from a VAX with full support for the Amiga's graphics,
and windowing? What is the lowest level of the OS that such a driver could
access, to avoid overhead? Details of speed are also helpful. Running at
*at least* 9600 baud as a graphics terminal is highly desired. Has this been
done anywhere? (I was glad to see the mod.amiga notes on Amigaterm; when I
ran an Amiga on the system here, the line was OK at high baud rates, but the
effective (ie screen display) rate seemed to be not much more than 1200 baud.)
- Doing away with Kickstart/Workbench, as least as much as possible. Is
there ANY way to reconfigure so that SYS:, C:, etc are looked for on DH0: at
bootup, without need for Workbench? I have heard a (highly unsubstantiated)
rumour that 1.2 will allow for something like this. Any comments, suggestions?
- Availability of Pascal (especially TurboPascal). I have heard no
mention of Borland for quite some time now on the net. Is there a Pascal out
now for the Amiga which will allow a novice (possibly to computers as well as
to Pascal) to learn Pascal in a friendly environment? The only notes on Pascal
for the Amiga that I have seen said (sorry, I can't remember *which* Pascal it
was) "This is a bare bones implementation." This relates somewhat to the
previous paragraph - ideally, you might have someone insert a Kickstart disk
at power-up which initialized the WCS, did all the DEVS:, etc assigns to DH0:,
then had a 1-line startup-sequence of "run DH0:TurboPascal". The idea is to
keep the number of floppies to a minimum.
Well, that's about it. Responses are welcomed. If you have knowledge of any
of the above, my mailbox is ready and waiting.
John Russell
UUCP: {akgua,allegra,cbosgd,ihnp4,utcsri}!garfield!john13
CDNNET: john13@garfield.mun.cdn
Disclaimer: All opinions, statements, etc about life, the universe, and
everything in the preceding letter are mine alone, not those of my
employer or this university. sdl@linus.UUCP (Steven D. Litvintchouk) (08/31/86)
> - Availability of Pascal (especially TurboPascal). I have heard > no mention of Borland for quite some time now on the net. Is there a > Pascal out now for the Amiga which will allow a novice (possibly to > computers as well as to Pascal) to learn Pascal in a friendly > environment? I have read/heard various rumors that Borland has indefinitely shelved its plans for porting Turbo Pascal to the Amiga. But if you're interested in learning, rather than system programming, why not learn Modula-2 instead? The Pascal language is 18 years old; Modula-2 can do everything Pascal can do, plus the all-important newer module concepts. And TDI Software makes a fairly good Modula-2 compiler for the Amiga. My needs aren't as easy to satisfy, however; I am still hoping someone will come out with a good *Lisp* environment for the Amiga! So far, no luck.... Steven Litvintchouk MITRE Corporation Burlington Road Bedford, MA 01730 Fone: (617)271-7753 ARPA: sdl@mitre-bedford UUCP: ...{cbosgd,decvax,genrad,ll-xn,philabs,security,utzoo}!linus!sdl