Pity the poor 286 folk

[Jeff Mann]

In article <9695 at ico.ISC.COM> rcd at ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes:
>I hope Microport isn't planning to leave 286 users out in the cold just
>because the 386 is in vogue...there are a lot of 286 boxen out there
>(aren't there? I hope?! hello?) which want a good UNIX.  Saying, "Hey, just

Yeah!  My uport286 system is pretty good, for what it is, now that 2.3 has
reduced the almost daily serial port panics, and I figured out how to use
getty with 8n1.  But it is a pretty insular universe.  I wanna run MS-word!
Is that too much to ask, without having to get some kind of klunky dosmerge
(if there even is one that works)??  Are there any decent applications I can
run?  I have spent the last year writing code on it, but I can't do everything!

I called our dealer to ask how to connect into an appletalk network, he said:  
"there is NO support for ANY kind of networking with V/AT!"  What kind of UNIX 
can't do networking???  The only thing I can think of is to use the KA9Q tcp/ip 
package over the serial port, that's really gonna please my MS-Word users!

I want a tape backup.  I'm *real* sick of swapping 50+ floppies around, but
I sure as hell can't afford $2000.00 (Canadian) for the ONLY drive supported.
That's more than my whole system is worth!   And what about SCSI??????

Well, that's what I want, but I don't think I'll get it.  I doubt that the
sales volume is there to justify all that work, especially if there is a
generic merged V/386 coming up soon which will support lotsa 3rd party
applications, networking, and devices.  So I guess Microport can't really
be blamed for leaving us "out in the cold".

Brrrrrrrrr........    wanna buy a used AT?
-- 
| Jeff Mann - Inter/Access, Toronto           ...uunet!mnetor!intacc!mann  |
| "A picture is worth 256 thousand words"  {utzoo, utgpu}!chp!intacc!mann  |