A/UX 3rd party product list

[Thad P Floryan]

First I'd like to state I'm pleased to find that controversial opinions and
statements CAN be posted to this newsgroup without incurring megabytes of
flaming hate mail and counter-postings.

Secondly, several emails have stated this newsgroup NEEDS a curmudgeon.
Though I don't consider myself churlish, I have been known to "snipe" at
Apple from time to time though I consider that more the role of a "Devil's
Advocate."  If there are no other volunteers, then let's continue with me
as the "designated curmudgeon."  :-)  :-)

OK, back to current issues, preceded by some background material.

First, it's my contention that proprietary operating systems are
dinosaurs and are doomed to a deserved dodo death within a decade.

For example, witness DEC's declining earnings and the ensuing layoff
of 8,000+ people as its customers are wising-up to the evils of VMS
and are insisting upon open systems such as UNIX.  And I'm no stranger
to their (DEC's) OS's, having used them since 1963, and having written
literally millions of lines of code of successful and profitable
commercial software on their PDP-10, DEC-20, and VAX/VMS platforms.
Even Apple itself has paid me and my company BIG BUCKS to use my
software on their in-house machines (the same software which, by the
way, I'm porting to A/UX among some other UNIX platforms).

It wasn't until 5 years ago I had the wool lifted from my eyes and saw
UNIX as one solution to much of what ails the computer industry.  With
software development costs reaching astronomical proportions, the
ability to easily and quickly move, or port, applications to new
hardware platforms sporting a conforming OS is literally a dream come
true for both the software vendors and users!

Though at technical meetings I joke "the nice thing about standards is
there are so many from which to choose," UNIX is (becoming) a standard
and its use is mandated by government procurement agencies; in a sense
this reminds me how those same agencies brought IBM to its senses during
the early 1960's by requiring support of the ASCII character set in all
computers purchased by the US Government.

And I'm not going to detail my present disappointment that A/UX is still
SVR2/BSD4.2 based and doesn't (appear to) support the ABI (Application
Binary Interface) featured in the latest SVR4; this fact will hurt Apple,
as some recent news releases detail displacement of Mac-based A/UX boxes
by SVR4-conforming UNIX boxes for undergrad use at places such as VPI
(Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)) (see
the Aug. 20, 1990, UNIX TODAY).

So what makes UNIX so attractive and desirable?  Among its salient features
are its multi-tasking and multi-user capabilities, and the wealth of
communication and documentation tools that accompany each and every system;
tools that (essentially) operate and function the same way in a system-
and device-INDEPENDENT fashion.  The benefits to all this are increased
productivity, no new learning-curve start-up time losses, and a familiar
and similar environment no matter whether one is using hardware manufactured
by AT&T (SVR3 and SVR4), Hewlett-Packard (HP-UX), IBM (AIX), Amdahl (UTS),
MIPS, DEC (Ultrix) and even Apple (A/UX) and Commodore (SVR4).

With tools such as nroff or troff or TeX, I can process documents in a
device-independent manner no matter whether I'm at the system console
using a hi-res bit-mapped screen, remotely on an ANSI compatible CRT,
locally to a 300DPI laser printer or a 1200DPI Linotronics, or even to
a TTY 33ASR.  With the DVI output of TeX, I can preview or print
documents using any device at hand or within my budget.

With termcap and/or terminfo capabilities handled OUTSIDE an application,
one need not re-write the application to support new devices.  I can log
onto, for example, A/UX at the console and view "man" pages, or I can log
in via the serial ports and ALSO view "man" pages without having done any
more than identify my "terminal" in the TERM environmental variable.
And these capabilities operate the SAME way on ANY UNIX system

For the record, though my company has three Mac SE and two Mac II (with
A/UX 2.0) systems, I've used the consoles less than 3 hours;  most of my
sessions with A/UX are "remote" via a network from my office or over a
modem from home.  Yeah, A/UX *IS* multitasking and multiuser!  :-)  :-)

The UNIX user community EXPECTS that level of compatibility, similarity
and familiarity.  The UNIX community also expects the extensibility
inherent with UNIX and its myriad shells, and is NOT going to look twice
at any offering that denies that to which they're accustomed because they
will find another source who WILL supply what they want.  This is one of
the benefits to the USER of UNIX' open system architecture (especially true
with the advent of SVR4).

And also for the record, I own and operate UNIX boxes from companies such
as AT&T, Convergent, Motorola and UNISYS, and I use UNIX systems manufactured
by HP, Amdahl, Sequent, Sun, and others, and, of course, Apple.  :-)  And I
run the AT&T Silicon Valley UNIX Users' Group.  Point being: I have a good
feeling for "what's out there" and users' needs, wants, desires and gripes.

With that groundwork established, let's examine the comments made concerning
my response to Kevin Brooks' posting of the "binhex stuffit format archive."

----------
mgchow at Apple.COM (Mike Chow) [A/UX Engineering]
in <44186 at apple.Apple.COM> writes:

``	I think you're being unfair here with comments like this.  My guess is
	that somebody at Apple produced this document and just happened to be
	using MS Word 4.0, and that was the easiest way to put that
	information on the server.

	Yes I agree, it's a good idea to distribute these documents as simple
	compressed text files as well.  But can't people just politely ask for
	a simple change without accusations and inuendos?
''

Kevin invited comments, and I expressed my opinions based on my experience
with UNIX.  Though simply uploading the "binhex stuffit" may have been the
easiest way to make the information available, it does naught for those
without the proprietary tools to peruse the document.

If Kevin feels my comments were "impolite", then I'll apologize to HIM.

It's MY contention that material intended for a UNIX audience be
UNIX-compatible.

Please describe how I could view a MS Word 4.0 document calling in on an
Ethernet or serial port using a VT100.  With [nt]roff or TeX it'd be no
problem; even better would be texinfo.tex format so I could use the info
"subsystem" within Emacs.

----------
tody at noao.edu (Doug Tody  CCS) [National Optical Astronomy Observatories]
in <1990Aug23.073331.282 at noao.edu> writes:

``	You are probably right that the guy [me ! :-) ] was being unfair - but
	I have to second the point made.  I guess I will have to deal with
	binhex stuffit since this seems to be a thoroughly intrenched Mac-ism
	(and unix versions of the necessary tools are available) but MS word
	4.0 is not likely to appear on my machine.  Probably the files could
	be read without it, but they certainly would not be nicely formatted!
''

"All's fair in business and war!"    And MS Word 4.0 is not on my machine
either, because I'm concerned ONLY about the UNIX aspects of the system.

----------
brooks at Apple.COM (Kevin Brooks)  [A/UX Specialist, Apple Computer]
in <44203 at apple.Apple.COM> writes:

``	>What's wrong with compressed cpio or tar archives whose textual
	>material is formatted per [nt]roff or TeX standards so that ANYONE
	>can read and/or process the material using the commonly available
	>and/or "free" tools which accompany one's system(s)?

	Yes, your right about the fact that everyone can run those utilities,
	but not everyone can easily create documents using those tools.
''

I'd be happy to show you how to use Emacs with its macro capability to easily
create source documents for use with either [nt]roff or TeX.  My primary
concern is for those of us who need to READ the finished product.  With any
of [nt]roff or TeX, it's trivial.

``	All this just because you don't like the format???  All you had to do
	was ask for the listing in another format.
''

I DID!  :-)

``	I was trying to do the user community a favor by posting a document
	which is only available from AppleLink otherwise.  I am not the keeper
	of the document nor the creator, I am but one support engineer at
	Apple who beleives that customers running A/UX have some special needs
	and support requirments, thats why I started the info/update server in
	the first place.
''

And you have my hearty thanks, both for your efforts and your attitudes!  I
did say "With all due respect ..."

``	Its a fairly large document that is really ugly when stored as text
	only file, I even spent an hour or so trying to clean it up before I
	decided that if I had to do this everytime the list was updated I would
	never get any real work done and the A/UX user community would never
	see this document.
''

You've nicely summed up the REAL PROBLEM.  I'm not being critical here, the
same problem exists within my own company regarding its documentation.  Now's
the time to start making changes with operating procedures so we all DON'T
have to waste time reformatting and cleaning up documentation ever again.

Hey, I, too, would rather be USING the computer rather than dorking around
with eleventy-seven word processing protocols.  Adopt ONE and stick with it.
My recommendation would be TeX since it's available for every computer (except,
perhaps, that VIC-20 with PET-ASCII :-)

``	I hope that one of the reasons people will want to buy A/UX is for its
	great support and I'll do everything I can do to help provide that
	support.

	I'll see about posting the list in a few different formats, how about
	native postscript?

	Kevin
''

Is "native postscript" compatible with ghostscript?  Please reconsider; let's
not start introducing other potential incompatibilities or inconveniences for
your intended audience.

In the just-received August 1990 Apple Developer Mailing (yeah, I'm an Apple
Partner to the tune of some $600/year), Apple iterates and re-iterates the
evils of ASSUMING what the user has/needs/wants.  One is NOT to assume a
given screen size or resolution.  One is NOT to assume the presence of a
math coprocessor given a non-MC68000 chip.  One is NOT to assume the printer
characteristics for documents.

And we all know what Benny Hill says about the word "ASSUME."   :-)  :-)

The whole point of the decades of thought and the shared-body of experiences
that went into the creation of tools such as [nt]roff and TeX is that the
products WILL function in a device-INDEPENDENT manner for present and future
compatibility and ease of use.  And the fact these tools are available at
essentially no cost does NOT mean they're junk.  DEC's user manuals are all
produced with TeX, as are the books from Addison-Wesley, and much of the US
Government-funded research projects, and most (if not all) the article
submissions for the computer technical journals of the ACM, IEEE, ACL, etc.

----------
wwedel at uswest.com (Wally Wedel)  [U S WEST Advanced Technologies]
in <10564 at uswat.UUCP> writes:

``	>What's wrong with compressed cpio or tar archives whose ...

	What's wrong is that if someone has chosen to use the features
	available in Word or MacWrite to enhance the presentation, these
	features get lost in the translation to troff unless some agreed
	standards for conversion are put in place.  I'd a lot rather have the
	original form documents with all of the presentation features which
	the writer put in place.  When, and if, we get to the point where we
	have an agreed mapping between troff and RTF (or whatever) then
	conversion would be OK.  --- Wally Wedel
''

Precisely.  If one wishes to seriously enter, say, the UNIX marketplace,
then one better rid oneself of "old" mindsets and preconceived notions and
take a look at what's really out there and what's being used and wanted.

It's my suggestion that (at least) future documents be composed using tool(s)
available to the community at large.  The marketplace will render its decisions
concerning products that don't meet the needs, requirements or expectations
of that market.

Thad

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]