Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!apollo!ulowell!ross@sword.ulowell.edu
From: ross@sword.ulowell.edu (Ross Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: why no native unix??
Message-ID: <10980@swan.ulowell.edu>
Date: 29 Dec 88 23:27:00 GMT
References: <33@draci.cs.uow.oz>
Sender: news@swan.ulowell.edu
Lines: 46

From article <33@draci.cs.uow.oz>, by pdg@draci.cs.uow.oz (Peter Gray):
> In article <4068750b.13e2d@apollo.COM>, ced@apollo.COM (Carl Davidson) writes:
>> Or as a friend of mine likes to say (I wish I had thought of this):
>> 	CROCK FOR CROCK COMPATIBLE.
>> Sorry. I just couldn't resist.  I'll go straight to my room now.

> This typifies the attitude at apollo. Instead of concentrating on the
> good things in UNIX its the "not invented here" approach. I would feel
> much happier about buying apollos if I did not see this sort of attitude
> *ALL* the time from apollo staff and devotees. You can not talk to these
> people without them trying to tell you how bad UNIX is and how great
> Aegis is. It turns me (and a lot of other people) off. Many suppliers
> like to point out how they have improved UNIX, but apollo is the only
> one who seems to think they can single handedly improve every feature
> and rewrite every utility to be better than the original.


I disagree.  The librarian was trashed for the obviously inferior
ar interface.  But, Apollo did insert the crock as requested.
	I've noticed that in this group people are very quick to
flame an attitude that existed in Apollo two years ago, but I
have seen that attitude is very different today on the part
of the people within Apollo, whom make it up.
9.7 is no longer "the" OS.  Running 10.x for a while confirms
that unix is here to stay on the apollos, but where unix
does not provide the functionality necessary a problem, like large 
networks of workstations, then Apollo fixes that problem.
	Jumping down a level for a second, yellow pages from
Sun has mutual exclusion problems when passwords are updated,
amongst other problems.  YP is not standard unix and "in my
opinion" would be a bad standard.  Registries sitting on top
of NCS however work, and work well.  The problem is that
while NCS runs on many machines, the registry code does not.
Should we go with YP because it runs on many more machines, and
put up with a bogus solution, or spend the time porting, learning,
and using a better solution?  Of course its easy to say that
philisophically the port should be done, and economically
YP should be used.  But, if the advanced system can survive
long enough eventually it will win.  A perfect example is
unix, look at the kludges that were excuses for operating
systems it replaced.  But, we must not stop at unix, we the
technical community must continue to progress, or technical
communities outside our own will succeede us.  

						Ross