Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!mordor!sri-spam!wohler
From: wohler@spam.istc.sri.com (Bill Wohler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: hp9000s300 grief, sorry
Message-ID: <12409@sri-spam.istc.sri.com>
Date: 4 May 88 05:06:56 GMT
Sender: nobody@sri-spam.istc.sri.com
Reply-To: wohler@spam.istc.sri.com (Bill Wohler)
Organization: SRI International
Lines: 62


  i sent the following to a group of people as a way of letting off
  some steam.  a couple of them, who work at hp, suggested i post it
  here for the benefit of the hp engineers.

  and so now, uncut, comes the cries of one engineer who would rather
  be doing something else...

	----- Forwarded message follows ----  
Date:    Tue, 03 May 88 11:22:59 PDT
In-reply-to: Dave Kumpf's message of Tue, 03 May 88 10:16:23 PDT.
	 <8805031717.AA05201@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> 
Subject: Re: sanitized unix 

  hp-ux boring dave?  hardly.  now that our software has to run on it,
  we have been spending all of our waking hours porting software to
  it.  it's very challenging coming up with filenaming conventions to
  get around the 14 character filename limit.  rather than go out to
  the movies, we watch our files with .c, .ms, .1 and ,q suffixes all
  get merged into one file.  it's very amusing reading all the neat
  stuff in the man pages only to see the disclaimer at the bottom of
  each saying that it isn't supported on the 300s (which is what the
  army, and thus us, uses).  it's fun doing dumps when you can't
  partition the disk.  when you do full dumps, you have to dump /usr
  and all that other neat system software that never changes (we put
  all the static software in a read-only /usr, dump it once, and
  ignore it for a while).  we're a networking shop and so we do lots
  of networking.  on other systems, the operating system does not
  allow more connections if inetd has used up all available file
  descriptors.  not hp-uxs.  inetd accepts more connections than it
  can handle, chokes and then dies so no more connections can be made.
  you can't even get an ICMP echo into the kernel!  this is fun stuff!

  oh i could go on!

  you even have to ifdef your .cshrc.  no more /usr/ucb.  vi is in
  /usr/bin!  thanks for csh and vi, bill joy, but we're not going to
  create a /usr/ucb!  

  imagine how stressful it must be to live in israel.  at any moment
  your car could blow up.  a user on an hp client lives in the same
  environment.  if the server reboots, all of its clients reboot also.
  poof!  so much for your editor session on that file.  so much for
  your graphics program that has been running for two and a half days.
  why not a stateless client model like the sun?

  and all because hp has good marketers.  how did they talk the army
  into accepting hp as a standard?  unfortunately, we developers deal
  with the problems and produce running software, so our managers and
  hence our clients see everything running all nicely and so they are
  happy with their decision.  they would, however, have seen much more
  software if their standard had been something more reasonable.  (i
  won't mention any names.)

  i haven't even begun to learn where system v has put all of the /etc
  files.

  the only thing that gives me any hope is that hp is quite responsive
  to user input, unlike some areas in sun.

  well, thank you.  that session has made me feel much better.

					--b "i'm going away to tahiti" w