Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!muslix.llnl.gov!jac
From: jac@muslix.llnl.gov (James Crotinger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga outclassed
Message-ID: <53218@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 21 Mar 90 17:09:16 GMT
References: <90078.164636JKT100@psuvm.psu.edu> <11886@vdsvax.crd.ge.com>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: jac@muslix.llnl.gov.UUCP (James Crotinger)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/UC Davis
Lines: 38


  I saw a demonstration of the new Macs and A/UX 2.0 yesterday. The
new Mac IIfx was impressive, but I'll keep my SparcStation, thank you.

  A/UX 2.0 was sort of a good-news/bad-news thing. Being an Amiga
lover I thought that this just might be a combination that I could
like--UNIX which would run virtually all Mac applications (even non-
32 bit clean ones). As has probably been mentioned, what they did
was to port Multifinder to run as an A/UX kernal task. When you
log in you are presented with what looks basically like an ordinary
Mac running multifinder, except that you can now fire up a shell
window! This all sounds wonderful. Now for the bad news. Mac applications
running under Multifinder are, well, Mac applications running under
Multifinder. They are not UNIX tasks. They don't do pre-emptive multitasking
amongst themselves. Multifinder itself is a UNIX task and as such it,
and applications running under it, do multitask with other UNIX tasks.
But unfriendly Mac applications can still bring the Multifinder interface
to its knees. Furthermore, Mac applications aren't protected from  
eachother. I asked what happens if a Mac application crashes. They hemmed
and hawed a bit and said that it would crash multifinder and throw you 
back to the login prompt. However someone in the audience said that in
practice this can actually cause a reboot!

  So, an A/UX mac does manage to add a CLI (and a UNIX one at that) to
the Mac system. This certainly is one of the big gripes us Amigans have
had with the Mac in the past. However you still do not get true multitasking.
The lack of memory protection would, for me, rule it out as an alternative
to another UNIX workstation. However when viewed as an alternative to
the Amiga (albeit a very expensive alternative) this is simply the
status quo. 

  BTW, I was very impressed with the speed of the windowing interface
(ie Multifinder). It appeared to be much more responsive than X11R4 
running on my SparcStation. They were running it on a IIfx, but that
is still probably a factor of 2 less horsepower than the sparc. They
ran a spirograph line drawing demo and it was blazingly fast. 

  Jim