Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ucsd!sdcsvax!trantor.harris-atd.com!melmac!chuck
From: chuck@melmac.harris-atd.com (Chuck Musciano)
Newsgroups: comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re: ventura
Keywords: ventura,xt
Message-ID: <2012@trantor.harris-atd.com>
Date: 3 May 89 12:34:56 GMT
References: <629@eeg.UUCP> <2008@trantor.harris-atd.com> <3719@nunki.usc.edu>
Sender: news@trantor.harris-atd.com
Reply-To: chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com (Chuck Musciano)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Advanced Technology Dept., Harris Corp., Melbourne, Fl.
Lines: 75

In article <3719@nunki.usc.edu> sawant@nunki.usc.edu (Abhay Sawant) writes:
>Maybe you haven't bothered to understand Ventura better.  I've checked
>Frame Maker: Ventura on a fast AT leaves it in the dust i.t.o. sheer 
>power and ease of use.
>
>A little less smug complacence would be helpful... the PC world has a
>lot to teach outfits like Sun. 

     There was a :-) on that post, in case you missed it... 
     
     I have seen Ventura, and found it lacking with respect to Frame Maker. A 
woman on the floor below was struggling to produce a newsletter with Ventura 
and was pretty much tearing her hair out.  We helped her move to Frame and she
is much happier and more elegantly coiffed. 

     The biggest drawback to any PC based tool is the tiny screen.  I'd go 
blind trying to dummy up several pages of text with it all Greeked out in a 
tiny font.  Any Sun tool, Frame or Publisher or whatever, at least benefits 
from a large bitmapped screen with square pixels.  Of course, you could always
drop a few thousands bucks to outfit your PC with a big monitor, but then you 
begin to approach workstation prices.  Especially if you add all the builtins 
of the workstation world: ethernet, 4 or 8 megs of memory, 140 or 327 meg 
disk, multitasking operating system, NFS, a suite of software development 
tools, etc. 

     I sat in on a meeting of the Harris Ventura Users Group and found it 
quite amusing.  The problems these people have with the PC world is 
astounding. This meeting's discussion centered around some addin board which 
allowed them to have more than 640K available to Ventura through some hacked 
MMU which plugged into the CPU socket on your motherboard.  What a 
harrassment!  Of course, this made Ventura run better, but wasn't completely 
compatible with other PC software.  One woman complained that her printer 
didn't seem to print certain characters in her documents.  No one knew about 
that one.  Other people couldn't get their printers consistently configured to
print all the time.  There was a demonstration of importing a bitmapped image 
into Ventura, with some confusion over a variety of image file formats and 
which could or could not be read.  In short, I got the impression that these 
people's lives were a continuous stream of random, confusing problems, most of
which can be traced to the difficulty of using many partially compatible 
products on a PC. 

     In the Sun world, we plugged our printer in, and it worked correctly. 
Forever.  I never even read the Frame Maker manual for about six months after 
getting the tool; it was that simple to use.  I don't worry about too little 
memory; my machine is a real computer, with virtual memory.  I can talk 
directly to thousands of other machines over the net without having to move 
files to floppy; in fact, we do all editing/markup/composition of our internal
Sun newsletter directly over the net, with articles sent in via e-mail or 
through NFS.  My biggest headache is that our HP ScanJet scanner must be 
hooked to a PC on our net, and the odds on that machine working for two 
consecutive days are about 50-50. 

     My office mate and I recently set a new record for ourselves: we produced
an eight page newsletter, complete with imbedded graphics and art, in just 
under 90 minutes.  This included all of the layout work, most of the proofing 
and markup, and all the editorial content decisions.  The copy was already 
written.  We each sat at a Sun, and via NFS, worked on different parts of the 
newsletter simultaneously.  Then we used Frame to pull all the pieces into our
master dummy.  After 90 minutes, we pulled camera-ready pages out of our 
LaserWriter, and walked them over to the print center. 

     Of course, while all this is going on, we can still move to other windows
on our desktop to execute a Unix command or read mail or news.  In our last 
issue, for example, we were dithering/halftoning several color images in one 
window while fooling with other components of the newsletter.  The machine (a 
Sun-3/60) has enough power to support such compute intensive tasks as digital 
image processing without any noticable lag in interactive response. 

     To recoin a phrase: you'll take my workstation away when you pry my cold,
dead fingers from the keyboard!

Chuck Musciano			ARPA  : chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com
Harris Corporation 		Usenet: ...!uunet!x102a!trantor!chuck
PO Box 37, MS 3A/1912		AT&T  : (407) 727-6131
Melbourne, FL 32902		FAX   : (407) 727-{5118,5227,4004}