BECK@VUVAXCOM.BITNET (09/29/88)
Re Jason Kuroiwa's questions about upgrading a slow Pro: I'm quite happy with my Pro350 and Venix, maybe because I like dinosaurs. I have worked around most of its problems and use it primarily for nroff, awk, and other Unix utilities. It also communicates with our networks via cu. However, if you're in the mood to upgrade, check out the AT&T machine that runs MS-DOS under Unix in a multiuser environment. Bob Beck (beck@villanova.edu.CSNET, beck@vuvaxcom.BITNET)
EVERHART%ARISIA.decnet@CRDGW1.GE.COM (09/26/89)
The Pro 350 is a PDP11 processor. When equipped with P/OS, there are quite a few PD applications; contact DECUS for a catalog (508 480 3418) of PD software, including PRO stuff. Two good Pascal compilers, a BASIC interpreter, a C compiler, FORTH, FOCAL, etc. are available. Also the DEC F77 compiler and mucho other stuff. The pro is more akin to a mini, and will do some nifty multitasking if you choose to use it...with HARDWARE protection of each task against the others, hardware floating point, etc. etc. There's a trick to booting off a floppy to regain control. Also [zzsys]firstappl.ptr should probably be deleted, and the pro native toolkit is a MUST. Given the native toolkit, the Pro is a quite respectable computer. Needs ms-dos like a battleship needs a popgun! However, there are third party companies (or were) if memory serves who made 8088 boards for a Pro so you could run msdos on it as well as P/OS...concurrently, yet! Most programs on the RSX SIG tapes (hundreds of megs of stuff) can be made to run, most with very little effort, on a pro; you just have to find a way to get the material onto media your pro can read. P/OS Kermit is one of the better ones out there, also. The major lossage of a pro is that I/D space separation is not supported by P/OS, which limits you to 8 page registers, making address space manipulation more of a chore. DEC has various PDP11 languages that apply to the pro...stuff like BASIC (distinct from the DECUS Basic dialect), Fortran 77, Cobol, Datatrieve, and various others. DEC compilers are fairly cheap on the pro...probably even more so now that the pro is, er, "stabilized". The two DECUS pascal compilers, NBS and Swedish differ in that NBS generates faster, more compact code, while Swedish is more standard-conformant. (Turbo is not very standard conformant, BTW.) Glenn Everhart Everhart%Arisia.decnet@crd.ge.com