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From: heather@blia.BLI.COM (Heather Mackinnon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Who sells PC/VI?:  Now MKS Toolkit
Message-ID: <2692@blia.BLI.COM>
Date: Thu, 21-May-87 14:39:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: blia.2692
Posted: Thu May 21 14:39:23 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 23-May-87 12:59:16 EDT
References: <42900004@uicsrd> <413@qiclab.UUCP> <2168@tekgvs.TEK.COM> <335@booboo.UUCP>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Britton Lee, Los Gatos, CA
Lines: 43
Summary: MKS Toolkit works fine

In article <335@booboo.UUCP>, amir@booboo.UUCP (Amir Majidimehr) writes:
> In article <242@mks.UUCP>, alex@mks.UUCP writes:
> > In article <2596@watdragon.UUCP>, absary@watdragon.UUCP (Al Sary) writes:
> 
> The release 2.0 (or whatever came out in January) was a fiasco.  I bought
> the package for "vi" and the *promissed* ksh.  The vi had serious bugs that
> were mostly fixed in 2.0 but as I mentioned in another article, it added
> new ones.

I use MKS's VI and also have used PC/VI and find MKS' to be faster and more
UNIX-like.  I have version 2.1d of the toolkit.  I have yet to find a bug
in version 2.1d and I spend considerable time editing 500+ source files.
No one would call me a vi novice, either.  I've been using vi on UNIX
systems since 1980.

> How could you send out the ksh in the state that it was in?  I have *never*
> had a buggier piece of software in my life (public domain included)!  It
> crashed the machine every four or five commands (either hangs or refusing
> to execute any commands).  I finally lost so much work that had to revert
> back to command.com. 

The ksh does have some severe limitations, primarily in the history 
substitution and alias expansion areas.  I have yet to have the ksh
crash my AT or behave strangely.

> And let me guess.  You are going to charge for this release, right?

I find this gentleman's tone offensive.  For the record, I have no
connection with MKS other than as a satisfied customer.  They're
selling a lot of software for the money and I would urge anyone who
wants the UNIX tools grep, vi, sed and so forth to purchase it.  The
interactive shell is not nearly as useful as a real UNIX shell,
therefore I don't often use it.  I do, however, use grep, sed, find,
vi, cat, more, ctags, mv, cp, rm, cd, nm, tee, tail, awk, join and
sort.  For the tags alone, MKS's product is much more useful to me
than ol' PC/VI.

Expecting a real shell to run on top of DOS for a minimal amount of money
is asking a lot.

Heather Mackinnon
Senior Software Engineer
Britton-Lee, Inc.