Hopefully not too stupid a question...

[William Roberts]

In article <6845 at sdcc6.ucsd.edu> ee299bw at sdcc6.ucsd.edu (Help On The Way) writes:
>However, the Mac also has many strengths: the standardization
>of some features across applications, the big screen on my mac
>(MegaGraphics 19") required NO reconfiguration of .STUPID files,
>most of the applications are quite good, Networking Macs is a piece
>of cake (at least at AppleTalk speeds)... the list goes on. I was
>hoping that AU/X would buy me out of the other annoyances, not to
>mention allow two or possibly three users to share a Mac....

The screen stuff does work under A/UX, without any .STUPID
files. You still get the stpuid behaviour if you run an
Application on a big screen (we have the Apple 2 Page displays)
then go back to an ordinary Mac II screen and the grow box is
off the screen so you can't make the window any smaller :-)

Networking Macs is still probably easy, IF you buy "AppleTalk
for A/UX" or "EtherTalk for A/UX" - these may be different
things. **** APPLE: WHY HAVE YOU UNBUNDLED THIS STUFF? *****
Networking Unix machines normally means TCP/IP and so you have
all of the hassles with choosing a network number (even if you
only have one network) and choosing node numbers and
maintaining hosts lists. RARP helps a little but not much.
AppleTalk over Ethernet runs at Ethernet speeds but with
standard Mac ease of networking.

>two or possibly three users to share a Mac....

Then it's not "personal computing" :-)
Actually this is technically feasible since you can add more
mice and keyboards to ADB, a Mac II has lots of slots for extra
video cards, but the snag would be getting more A/UX consoles
to work and having multiple mac applications which don't share
anything much. I don't expect Apple will lose sleep over this...


-- 

William Roberts                 ARPA: liam at cs.qmw.ac.uk
Queen Mary & Westfield College  UUCP: liam at qmw-cs.UUCP
Mile End Road                   AppleLink: UK0087
LONDON, E1 4NS, UK              Tel:  01-975 5250 (Fax: 01-980 6533)