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From: krowitz@mit-kermit.UUCP (David Krowitz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Is Apollo a Unix box
Message-ID: <8705282057.AA03390@EDDIE.MIT.EDU>
Date: Thu, 28-May-87 16:24:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: EDDIE.8705282057.AA03390
Posted: Thu May 28 16:24:15 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 30-May-87 09:12:13 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Distribution: world
Organization: The ARPA Internet
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I agree. Pure unix is obsolete. Even the venerable Decsystem 10 running TOPS-10
(and not the newer BBN Tenex, or TOPS-20) had better file protection scheme
than BSD4.2 does. The Apollo distributed registries are *much* better than
/etc/passwd and /etc/group. I can manage 15 Apollo nodes belonging to seven
professors with (roughly) sixty graduate students with less work than it
takes to manage one Sun 3 and one Alliant FX/1. It is my ferverent hope that
in becoming more 'real unix' like that Apollo does not give up the advantages
they already have over BSD4.2 (like commands that have a consistant set of
switches, not some with a '-' and some without; typed objects which allow my
programs to test if they are reading the right kind of file before they
start reading garbage; an extensible file system which I can use to create
mu own file types and device drivers; and a set of disk utilities (INVOL,
SALVOL, etc.) which don't require me to deal with the number of tracks, heads,
sectors per tracks, and bytes per block of the disk every time I want to
change the size of a partition).


                                   -- David Krowitz

mit-erl!mit-kermit!krowitz@eddie.mit.edu
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