system@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (System Admin (Mike Peterson)) (09/13/90)
>In article <ASHERMAN.90Sep7114636@dino.ulowell.edu>, asherman@dino.ulowell.edu (Aaron Sherman) writes: >> The problem here is that Domain/OS is NOT Unix, and the more HP/Apollo >> tries to make it Unix the more people will get frustrated. Remember that >> for YEARS Unix was not "standard". >> >> Standards. Bah! Standards brought us MSDOS. Standards brought us MOTIF. >> I much prefer the old Apollo attitude. You want BSD, have it. You want >> SystemV, have it. Heck, you can make Apollos act like a PC. You can have >> DDS, TCP/IP or DECNet. You can use X, the DM, even MS-Windows if you're sick. >> Since the HP-takeover though, people like this poster have been having >> more of a voice in the direction Apollo's taking, and I fear the day >> an Apollo is just as much a toy as the next machine. Standardization is the way of the world, and Aegis/DM/Apollo-Token-Ring isn't going to make it (and is no great loss in our view :-)). The only reason we bought Apollo was that they promised a standard UNIX (BSD) environment, just like most of the other world-wide university science departments either already have or are switching to soon. We run X on all our systems as the default window system/manager, and can not understand why MOTIF is not built in to Domain/OS since it was developed in part by HP, who owns Apollo the last I heard :-). We are striving to be as standard as possible, so we can take advantage of advances in cpu speed, etc., from whatever vendor can supply it in a timely and cost-effective manner. In article <1801@tuvie> mike@tuvie (Inst.f.Techn.Informatik) writes: >There are great things in DomainOS (you forgot to mention my favorite, the >//netdirectory :-), BUT there are annoying things in DomainOS as well, like: > [... some items deleted ...] >* If you need to raise the number of process slots, you're out of luck! > >* If you have problems with buggy include files, you are told > "Wait for OSF/1" > >* Programs which work on any other computer break on Apollos. I too love the // directory and easy file transparency, but these 3 items cover a lot of the problems - the BSD UNIX environment is incomplete and incompatible with SUN/OS and ULTRIX where a lot of public-domain code has been developed, yet at least some of the missing functionality could have been provided (at least for lookup purposes, which is all most p-d programs want to do - e.g. /dev/kmem, disk superblocks). These things are part of BSD UNIX; if they are omitted, then no claim to offer BSD UNIX should be (or have been) made. Our DN10K is an Ethernet/Token Ring gateway, and normally runs nearly 50 processes before the first user gets on; when the process limit was 64 on such a system, our 15 regular users had to take turns logging in. Speaking of Ethernet, like it or not, it is the main way heterogeneous systems are connected today (and probably for quite a while in the future) - the Apollo Ethernet / TCP/IP is a disaster (our 10K still hangs once a week on average with TCP problems, after 1 1/2 years). -- Mike Peterson, System Administrator, U/Toronto Department of Chemistry E-mail: system@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca Tel: (416) 978-7094 Fax: (416) 978-8775