wanted: UNIX or clone

[Jay Ts]

In article <1991Apr29.031654.17360 at agate.berkeley.edu>, ilan343 at violet.berkeley.edu (Geraldo Veiga) writes:
> In article <1991Apr28.225644.10469 at nstar.rn.com> larry at nstar.rn.com (Larry Snyder) writes:
> >ilan343 at violet.berkeley.edu (Geraldo Veiga) writes:
> >
> >>By the way, are there any mainstream commercial applications
> >>(WordPerferct, 123, Dbase, etc) that won't run under  some 386 Unix
> >>variants? 
> >
> >Sure - look at Norton - they are specifically for Interactive.
> 
> >Look at Word Perfect, they have a version for SCO Unix and Interactive
> >Unix - but not for ESIX.
> 
> Now for the follow-up question.  Why?

I think it's just a case of Wordperfect not realizing how similar ISC UNIX
and ESIX are.  I really doubt there would be any problem that could not be
easily worked around.

There are a few minor differences, like ESIX calling the virtual terminals
/dev/vcXX where ISC calls them /dev/vtXX, and ESIX using the AT386-M terminfo
for the console while ISC calls it AT386.

I've not done too much of this, but I've had 100% success so far (ok, I've
only done it once :-) using a device driver for ISC that installed and
worked fine under ESIX, with the hardware vendor telling me "We don't
support ESIX." (Computone)

> How come a text-based
> application  like Wordperfect can't be made to run under all of the 386
> plataforms.

If you are including Xenix, in that case Wordperfect has two different
products -- one for UNIX and one for Xenix 386.  The Xenix product will
not run on UNIX, due at least to not having support for the the UNIX
console in the Xenix product.  Xenix handles the console differently.

To continue to answer your question, a better example would be SCO's
Lyrix word processor.  I have migrated a client from Xenix 286 to
ESIX rev. D.  There were two problems moving lyrix.  First, when lyrix
prints, it tries to access the lpr command.  This was easy to work
around.  Second, lyrix (and I'm told other SCO applications as well)
modifies the terminal settings when it starts up, but does not clean
up after itself when it exits.  This messes up some other applications
(I'm having trouble with RealWorld accounting at the moment).

It's stupid little things like this that lead people to using phrases like
"theoretical binary compatibility" when referring to the merge of Xenix
and AT&T Unix in System V 3.2.

Jay Ts, Director
Metran Technology
uunet!pdn!tscs!metran!jay