Future direction of A/UX?

[nghiem]

> I need there to be more than 1500 machines to sell to, and a way to find them.
> 
> Correction or corroboration welcome.  Any other A/UX developers on the net?

First, I think Apple has done well with A/UX, considering that there
are only about 1500 machines out there--probably not a huge profit
making enterprise for Apple. Second, in my opinion, A/UX has far less
problems than AIX/AOS--read comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt sometimes. People have had
huge problems with the RT, and there are ten's of thousands of these 
clunkers out there.

I too would like to see improvements. I have had my share
of problems getting somethings to work. But I and my colleages
have had much worse problems
dealing with the IBM-RT. Considering the size difference between IBM and
Apple, Apple is not doing too bad.

It should be clear, especially around the Universities, that
true BSD compatibility is a must. Most of the problems that I have noted
and that other people have complained about, whether on the II and especially
on the RT is that someone has a standard BSD application, for example
Gnu-Emacs, Xwindows, or the standard C-kermit distribution that is simply
a b%^&% to get to run on a machine that is not a Sun or a Vax; or that someone
has an established network and they cannot get NFS or telnet or rlogin
to work with the existing Suns, Vaxes, and HP's . While it seems that Apple
has been able to address this problem for the most part, IBM 
with their AOS for the RT had not been able to master this problem with the
latest release of Emacs and Xwindows and they had problems
telnet and NFS with their latest version of AIX.

Quality is a very big concern for everybody. The new Mac's seem
to be victims of cost cutting. While the new 3.5" Quantums HD40's are
noticibly faster than the original 5.25" Quantums HD40, I have had three of
the 3.5's seize within the warranty period. I've noted complaints about
the new mouse that are distributed with the new Mac's as well. I've noted 
a slight divergence on the screens of our two new Apple RGB monitors 
and noted complaints and experienced the heat and the burning semi-conductor 
smell that eminate from the tops of these new monitors, but not the 
older Apple RGB monitors. 

Quality control should be significant for A/UX as well. It is EXTREMELY 
frustrating to spend a whole morning assisting a colleague
attempting to filter unwanted characters from a MacOS file
that has been read to AUX when, in the man page, someone has left out 
extremely significant quotations that surround the character to be filtered.

But, ever try to use the man page in AIX?--you have to BUY the man pages
separate from the AIX product.

nghiem
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