GTHEALL@PENNDRLN.BITNET (George A. Theall) (12/19/87)
About a month ago I saw a posting to the board about Enhanced Rainbow/VENIX. Not being familiar with Unix and its variants but anxious to learn about DOS alternatives, I'd like to know a bit more about VENIX. Who sells it? How much does it cost? Could it run DOS as an application (so my current software library would not have to be discarded)? How does it compare to DOS performance- wise? What reasons would one have for prefering VENIX over DOS? George
campbell@maynard.BSW.COM (Larry Campbell) (12/20/87)
In article <8712181754.AA06680@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> GTHEALL@PENNDRLN.BITNET (George A. Theall) writes:
<>
<> About a month ago I saw a posting to the board about Enhanced
<>Rainbow/VENIX. Not being familiar with Unix and its variants but
<>anxious to learn about DOS alternatives, I'd like to know a bit
<>more about VENIX. Who sells it? How much does it cost? Could it
<>run DOS as an application (so my current software library would
<>not have to be discarded)? How does it compare to DOS performance-
<>wise? What reasons would one have for prefering VENIX over
<>DOS?
We -- the Boston Software Works -- sell it. It costs $800.
It cannot run DOS as an application (doing so is impossible on an 8088;
you need at least a 286 and really a 386 to do that right). It can read
and write DOS floppies and the DOS partition on your hard disk.
It is difficult to compare the performance of VENIX and DOS, since VENIX
is a real multitasking operating system, and DOS is a pitiful brain-dead
boot loader. Since VENIX overlaps computation and I/O, you can get a lot
more work done in an hour than you can with DOS. But of course if things
are going on in the background (for instance, as I'm typing this reply,
news is arriving from my news feed), the system can get quite a bit slower
than DOS.
One really nice thing about using VENIX is the multitasking. I have
a Mandelbrot set program that generates stunning pictures on the Rainbow
color graphics board. But it takes a long time to run -- from 15 minutes
to several hours, depending on the location in the set. Under DOS, my
machine would be completely tied up while the program ran. Under VENIX,
I run it in background and hardly notice that it's there.
Why use VENIX? Why use DOS? Well, if you want to run off-the-shelf
application programs -- if you're not a programmer -- stick to DOS.
(Although these days, you should also stick to the IBM PC, which is where
all the applications are.) But if you want to write programs and have
a powerful and sophisticated programming environment in which to do so,
then you want VENIX.
Also, and this is more in the entertainment category than in the work
category, VENIX can get you on the Usenet. This system, "maynard", is
a Usenet node that carries between 75 and 100 megabytes of traffic each
month. And it's a Rainbow running VENIX.
--
Larry Campbell The Boston Software Works, Inc.
Internet: campbell@maynard.bsw.com 120 Fulton Street, Boston MA 02109
uucp: {husc6,mirror,think}!maynard!campbell +1 617 367 6846