Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!comp.vuw.ac.nz!am.dsir.govt.nz!tui.marcam.dsir.govt.nz!tony From: tony@tui.marcam.dsir.govt.nz (Tony Cooper) Newsgroups: comp.unix.aux Subject: Re: Cave Men and Dinosaurs Keywords: arcaic Message-ID: <1991May25.052820.27220@am.dsir.govt.nz> Date: 25 May 91 05:28:20 GMT References: Sender: news@am.dsir.govt.nz Reply-To: sramtrc@albert.dsir.govt.nz Organization: Applied Mathematics Group D.S.I.R. Lines: 40 In article , numb@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@albert.dsir.govt.nz