Cave Men and Dinosaurs

[Tony Cooper]

In article <numb.675098076 at el_greco>, numb at cs.qmw.ac.uk (Matt Newman) writes:
|> I'm getting more and more fed up of trying to bring software from usenet
|> up on our A/UX machines. So few things compile without considerable
massaging

The correct spelling is 'archaic' (even in the UK). I think your statement is
so obvious (is the Pope Catholic?) that we can safely assume that Apple is
working on SVR4 right this minute. I'm sure that Apple are aware that anyone
who is going to buy unix is going to buy eg SunOS for which there are
thousands of programs available, rather than A/UX for which the number is
(guessing) in single figures.

|> Personnally A/UX 1.1.1 was better :-)

True. There are more third party programs written for 1.1.1 than 2.0. That's
because third party people thought that A/UX was going to be a better seller
than it turned out to be. When 2.0 came along they were wiser.

I think 2.0 is better if you know how to use it. 2.0 has three unix
environments SVR?, BSD, and POSIX. There are compiler options for using them
easily. The skill is in knowing which ones to use (and using combinations of
them). I don't know what the ? is but it's sort of 2 and sort of 3, but
A/UX definitely is not solely SVR?. It has the good bits of several unixes
plus a bit of MacOS in it. Porting is a pain but most bits are there if you
can find them (except BSD tty stuff, for example).

Have you noticed that with time, A/UX is looking more like MacOS and MacOS is
looking like A/UX? I would like to see this continue till they converge
and A/UX is dropped. Then MacOS will be unix compatible and buyers will not
buy SunOS when for the same price they can get MacOS on superior hardware.
Then it will be a kind of MacOS/Motif/OpenLook war where MacOS clearly wins
since it has everything the others have plus thousands of MacOS programs.
Imagine adding devices to the kernel by dropping them into the Extensions
folder and adding daemons to the startup folder and adding a uucp module
to the communications folder or POSIX, BSD, or whatever tty modules you
want etc.

Tony Cooper
sramtrc at albert.dsir.govt.nz