Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-crg!rutgers!caip!brl-adm!brl-smoke!brl-sem!ron From: ron@brl-sem.ARPA (Ron Natalie ) Newsgroups: net.emacs Subject: Re: Question of curiosity: who is still buying Unipress or CCA? Message-ID: <437@brl-sem.ARPA> Date: Mon, 6-Oct-86 04:37:13 EDT Article-I.D.: brl-sem.437 Posted: Mon Oct 6 04:37:13 1986 Date-Received: Tue, 7-Oct-86 20:59:36 EDT References: <5205@cbrma.UUCP> Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD. Lines: 44 Summary: Why I *PAY* for EMACS BRL has been using EMACS on UNIX for about 5 years now. What we started with was a copy of Montgomery's EMACS on the PDP-11's here. It worked pretty well, we proceded to pick up some of Steve Zimmerman's early modifications. As time went on, people wanted bigger and better EMACS and we did a comparison between the Zimmerman (CCA) and Gosling code and chose Goslings. We used an early release copy of it, substantially hacked by Spencer Thomas on our VAX's for several years. Last year we licensed all our machines for UNIPRESS EMACS, which is the supported outgrowth of Gosling's code. Since the furor over the proprietary nature of Montgomery's EMACS, we've it with JOVE. We have also compiled and installed GNU on our VAX. BRL has UNIX machines ranging from PDP-11's, VAX's, GOULDs, PERKIN-ELMER's, SUNs, Silicon Graphix's IRISs, Alliants, and coming later this year, CRAYs. The reason I buy UNIPRESS EMACS is that it has never taken me more than a few hours to move UNIPRESS to a new machine running UNIX, and when I have any problems there is a phone number and real people I can talk to who will help get the problem fixed. Compare this with GNU, which to start with is ihnerently non-portable code, which Stallman refuses to remove the silly VAX dependancies from. Then after I manage to cull net.emacs for the code for bug fixes, etc... it becomes a full time job to support GNU. A job which is slightly different on each machine I have. No thank you, I'll stick with UNIPRESS and let someone else do the work. UNIPRESS now offers fairly up-to-date manuals as well documenting not only the editor itself, but each piece of MLISP on the distribution (which is a lot, and yes, the manual is large). UNIPRESS is perhaps the only small company of it's kind that I've dealt with that has it's own full-time tech writer. Frequently the major trade-off between "free" software and the stuff you have to pay for is the amount of your own time you have to put in to supporting it. If you compute how much it actually takes to pay a programmer, you'll find that the $1000 or less you pay for a commercial EMACS is well worth it. For example, just doing the inital installation of GNU on our VAX took one of our programmers over a day and then I had to sit there and hack unexec for a while since we were running an early 4.3 beta at the time. Regarding performance. Yes GNU is a bear. UNIPRESS is better, but as you may have noticed by the number of number crunching machines we have that compared with most of our applications code, EMACS is small and fast. For the remaining PDP-11's and other oxygen starved life at BRL, JOVE is fast, cheap, and easy to maintain.