Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!um-math!hyc
From: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: A proposal--TOS Replacement Project
Keywords: TOS, replacement project, STOS
Message-ID: <462@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu>
Date: 11 Nov 88 06:44:43 GMT
References: <700@sdcc15.ucsd.edu> <17702@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
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Reply-To: hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Organization: University of Michigan Math Dept., Ann Arbor
Lines: 46
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In article <17702@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> acm@cs.ucla.edu writes:
>So far I have not come across someone that has HATED it.  Will anyone who has
>MINIX already care to comment or provide the disadvantages?
>
>
>Plinio Barbeito
>P.S.
>It really would have been best for me to post something like this AFTER I had 
>my copy of MINIX, but as long as you were asking for people's 2 cents...
>---
>UUCP:  ...!{...}!ucla-cs!acm
>ARPA:  acm@cs.ucla.edu
>VOICE: (213) 825-5879, 825-7597

I've got it, I like it, it's really nice. But heck, I'm a Unix nut by trade
and I like hacking. And, nice as the system is, it really isn't usable for
much other than hacking right now. No support for the serial port yet, no
real applications, nothing more than (!) a Unix programming environment. The
idea of building TOS compatibility into it is interesting, since a successful
attempt would yield a lot of usable applications in one fell swoop. I really
dislike TOS. Really. Intensely. But many of my reasons are pretty trivial.

For example, one thing that drives me absolutely nuts is using the backslash
as a directory separator. I wish this were a modifiable system variable. It's
so amazingly inconvenient... But also amazingly trivial. I haven't given up
TOS yet, because my favorite application, Uniterm, onl;y runs under TOS.
Ah well...

But that's all kind of irrelevant. Minix offers a lot - multitasking, I/O
redirection, inter-process communications (pipes), more flexible filesystem,
other good stuff. If there was any networking hardware to speak of on the
market, it'd be a cinch to turn an ST running Minix into a decent workstation
in its own right.

Hmm... Trying to get back to the main point... "Right out of the box," there's
almost nothing for a computer "user" to gain from Minix. For a (group of?)
dedicated programmer(s), it has a lot of potential. TOS, on the other hand, has
an established user base, established suite of applications, etc. However, I
don't see very much in the future for TOS. (What can you expect from a system
that looks so much like MSDOS, another doomed dinosaur?) 
--
  /
 /_ , ,_.                      Howard Chu
/ /(_/(__                University of Michigan
    /           Computing Center          College of LS&A
   '              Unix Project          Information Systems