Future direction of A/UX?

[Alexis Rosen]

Before I step into the furnace, I just want to say that I've just sunk a fair
amount of money into a large A/UX system, and I did so with my eyes open- I
know what I'm getting into, and I don't intend to bitch about lack of support
for A/UX once I start getting into trouble... I'll just do it now :-)

There are a few things that really bother me about A/UX, and some of them
have already been mentioned (by Amanda Walker and Tim Endres). But despite
the admirable support of various Unix features, and a fairly nifty merging
of System V with BSD, there are two items in particular that bug me:

1) Where is FFS??? The A/UX side has been around for over a year, but SASH
    et. al. need to be rewritten. I know this is lots of work, but it's
    really important!

2) When is the porting base going to be moved to SVR3? There are some very
    significant problems with SVR2, in particular with serial line control
    and modems. These problems are apparently fixed in R3.


Oh- there is one other problem. There is no standard way of talking to a tape
drive. You can buy the Irwin drives, which are very nice, but why aren't there
standard drivers for the three typical backup devices available for the Mac?
Three drivers is all it takes: One for the Teac 60, one for the DC2000, and
one for the Tandberg 150. How seriously can we take a system that can't be
backed up?


At least it's beginning to look like we'll see some serious hardware out of
Apple this year. The new Macs might well come close to the new Sun and Apollo
030 machines. This will finally correct the other great flaw in A/UX, which
was that it didn't have a really powerful box to run on. One down, three
to go. :-)

---
Alexis Rosen
alexis at ccnysci.{uucp,bitnet}
alexis at rascal.ics.utexas.edu  (last resort)