Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!mks!alex
From: alex@mks.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Who sells PC/VI?:  Now MKS Toolkit
Message-ID: <242@mks.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 2-Apr-87 10:05:06 EST
Article-I.D.: mks.242
Posted: Thu Apr  2 10:05:06 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Apr-87 11:53:15 EST
References: <42900004@uicsrd> <413@qiclab.UUCP> <2168@tekgvs.TEK.COM> <2596@watdragon.UUCP>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Mortice Kern Systems, Waterloo, Ont.
Lines: 71

In article <2596@watdragon.UUCP>, absary@watdragon.UUCP (Al Sary) writes:
> >I agree, except that I recommend purchasing the MKS Toolkit from
> >
> >	Mortice Kern Systems, Inc.
> >	43 Bridgeport Road East
> >	Waterloo, Ontario
> >	Canada  N2J 2J4
> >	519-884-2251
> >
> >which contains not only vi, but a Korn-ish shell (did I really write
> >that?!), awk, sed, cpio, dd and much, much more. Price is in the
> >US$140 range.
> >
> >I wouldn't be without the MKS stuff on a PC. And their license is
> 
> I agree; it is a very nice set of programs, plus Korn shell is quite nice
> (beats the hell out of MS-DOS).
> 
> Get this: vi catches ^Z, and the job is stopped, with fg used for restart
> (I don't think this is very safe though; at times this feature seemes to
> cause problems).
Most of the problems that this cause are due to lack of memory - actually
it is very reliable.  Can't run it from the Korn shell though because
the Korn shell may need to grow and there is this programme sitting right above
the Korn shell where it wants to grow to.
> 
> >On a scale of 1 to 10 I give MKS a 9. They only lose 1 point because
> >I can't figure out how to send things to the printer without
> >invoking command.com - and staying there while the printer finishes.
> 
> I discovered the same problem; I don't know how to get around it either.
> 
> I am not sure I would scale it at 9 for reliability just yet.  Our
> system seems to die quite frequently without much reason.  The ps
> command also shows some strange memory allocations at times.  I have
We'd appreciate it if you would phone our technical support department
-- we haven't had any reports of `strange memory allocations'.  Or for
that matter `system seems to die quite frequently without much reason'.
If you are having problems we would like to try to sort them out.
We do indeed know of several problems in early Korn-shells that went out -
anybody who phones will get sent a later release with these problems fixed.
[We would send to everybody automatically except that with so many utilities
in the toolkit, a majority of people probably don't even use the shell, but
just vi, or just awk or such.]

> MKS version 2.1, and hoping that version 2.2 (available soon hopefully)
> will fix some of the problems.  It is also advertised to have job
> control feature.
Hang on - who advertised that?  To have the job control feature requires
writing multi-tasking which requires all kinds of ms-dos violations.  In
all the 70-odd different .exe's you get with the toolkit we violate ms-dos
only for
1) fast screen updates in vi by bypassing bios and direct access to the screen,
2) access to the hardware timer-chip in the profiler and time commands,
3) fg and :stop in vi.

To set the record straight on what will be in the next release of the toolkit,
version 2.2 it is as follows:
pr fold expand unexpand uname env deroff fmt pack unpack pcat
new AWK -multi-dimension arrays, symtab, garbage collection.
New SH - vi&emacs editing mode and many small things
VI - ega-support for >24 lines
login, init, passwd

Date for release 2.2 is not set yet - we hope to go to beta release at the
end of this month, with real release by June.  But no promises!

Alex White

Please feel free to direct toolkit questions to
	...watmath!mks!toolkit