Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!cbmvax!rutgers!husc6!think!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!sdcrdcf!trwrb!felix!preston
From: preston@felix.UUCP (Preston Bannister)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Free RTX (or maybe almost)
Message-ID: <21215@felix.UUCP>
Date: 15 Feb 88 04:47:45 GMT
References: <2383@ihuxy.ATT.COM>
Sender: daemon@felix.UUCP
Lines: 53

>> One question - is RTX any good ?  Do we really want it in the public domain
>> or will it end up a dog like GEM ?

A good question.  I bought the first version of the MT C-shell (that
is built on top of RTX).  At the time I didn't have a hard disk, and
the shell hit the disk fairly often in normal operation.  As a result
it was way to slow to be useful.

Beckmeyer sent out an update notice several months ago, and I bought
the MT C-Shell update (version 1.10), the Micro C-Shell, and the Hard
Disk Accelerator.

The hard disk accelerator seems to do a fairly good job of eliminating
all those extra disk accesses that TOS usually makes.  It is always
installed on my hard disk and is generally fairly ignorable :-)

The Micro C-shell is also a fairly good product.  I tend to switch
between it and Gulam about equally.  (Gulam doesn't do pipes, among
other things).

After David Beckmeyer's posting I tried running the MT C-Shell
software in a previously empty partition on my hard disk.  

I ran it for a short while.

- Screen (text) output seemed a bit slow.

- Interaction response is slow and jerky with programs running in
  background.  To be fair, this may be due to the ST BIOS
  implementation.

- The whole thing crashed after about 5-10 minutes of use.  I don't
  know why and didn't try to find out.

My \auto\ folder installs, in order, a 100K 'eternal' ramdisk, the
beckmeyer hard disk accelerator, and Gemboot (a 40 folder bug
workaround).

I'd be interested in hearing experiences from other people who have
tried RTX and/or the MT C-Shell.

-----
Preston L. Bannister
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Preston L. Bannister
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