dlw@hpsmtc1.HP.COM (David Williams) (05/14/88)
As I understand it, there is not much space left on an 80 meg drive if you intend to do development or have serious use of A/UX. Obviously, one can get third party drives such as the DataFrame 150XP or some 300meg monster, but will Apple be extending its disk drive product line to higher capacity drives in the 100+meg capacity? Or for even more outlandish requests how about shipping A/UX & docs on a CD for the Apple CD rom player? And if you provide a driver in A/UX to support the CD drive then the man pages can all be uncompressed! David Williams "You may be the Master of Sinanju, but you're not the Master of Automobile"
tedj@hpcilzb.HP.COM (Ted Johnson) (05/19/88)
>Or for even more outlandish requests how about shipping A/UX & docs on a CD for >the Apple CD rom player? And if you provide a driver in A/UX to support the >CD drive then the man pages can all be uncompressed! At the recent SVNet A/UX presentation (at Apple, by Apple), someone asked when/if Apple intended to put all the man pages and other Unix documentation on a CD ROM. Apple's response was that it would be way off in the future, if ever, because there were all sorts of man page copyright issues to be settled first. Even though Apple rewrote most of the man pages, someone else originally wrote them, so there is the issue of "inheritance" to be considered. Basically, Apple needs to get the permission of anyone who contributed to the man pages (AT&T, etc.) before Apple modified them. And they have to make royalty agreements with all of them also. One heckler said that even though Apple rewrote the man pages, "they still have an AT&T 'look and feel'". Everyone laughed and the Apple reps just looked chagrined. As well they should. -Ted
phil@Apple.COM (Phil Ronzone) (05/24/88)
In article <890005@hpcilzb.HP.COM> tedj@hpcilzb.HP.COM (Ted Johnson) writes: >At the recent SVNet A/UX presentation (at Apple, by Apple) ... >One heckler said that even though Apple rewrote the man pages, "they still >have an AT&T 'look and feel'". Everyone laughed and the Apple reps just >looked chagrined. As well they should. Ahem. No, we didn't look chagrined. Apple would like to have rewritten ALL the A/UX (i.e., UNIX) documentation to Apple documentation standards. The cost would have been UNBELIEVABLE. And it would have taken years. The A/UX documentation set, at 6,000+ pages, is more than ALL OTHER Apple documentation for COMBINED. We would have dearly loved to have it all rewritten. And guess what group would have to PROOF all that rewriting? Yes, us software types, thus taking time away from software development. The manual set cost would then be extremely high. And goodness knows, we would have then been flamed for "destroying" the much loved man page format etc. etc. etc. ... ( :-) ???). So we didn't. But we did rewrite all the non-man documenatation. And the areas such as system administration and getting started were where we put in the most effort. And we did the most important manuals in the Macintosh documentation look and feel. So we did look into redoing all the documentation. Until we saw the cost and time. Anyway, A/UX has to have SOME tradition! :-) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Philip K. Ronzone A/UX System Architect Apple Computer MS 27AJ 10500 N. DeAnza Blvd. Cupertino CA 95014 {amdahl,decwrl,sun,voder,nsc,mtxinu,dual,unisoft}!apple!phil "In A/UX Release 4.0, /bin will still be there ...." P. Zigbooli
dorourke@polyslo.UUCP (David O'Rourke) (05/24/88)
In article <10934@apple.Apple.Com> phil@apple.UUCP (Phil Ronzone) writes: >The cost would have been UNBELIEVABLE. And it would have taken years. >The A/UX documentation set, at 6,000+ pages, is more than ALL OTHER >Apple documentation for COMBINED. We would have dearly loved to have it >all rewritten. So Apple hod to lower it's standards in order to bring Unix to the Macintosh. :-), :-) :-) :-) No think it was a wise decision not to spend the time changing the Unix man pages, after all I've come to know and hate those pages with a passion. It would dissapoint me if they were different. Unix isn't suppose to be better, it's suppose to be a standard. Besides I'd rather see MPW 3.0 this year rather than an Apple quality unix man page. -- David M. O'Rourke Disclaimer: I don't represent the school. All opinions are mine!