Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!bu-cs!madd
From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: AIX questions?
Message-ID: <32283@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 4 Jun 89 18:50:33 GMT
References: <3580017@eecs.nwu.edu> <592@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <10091@watcgl.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost)
Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Organization: Software Tool & Die
Lines: 31

In article <10091@watcgl.waterloo.edu> smvorkoetter@watmum.waterloo.edu (Stefan M. Vorkoetter) writes:
|I am also running DOS Merge, which lets me run
|my DOS based terminal emulator in a winodw under AIX.  This is especially
|amazing when you consider that the emulator accesses the hardware directly,
|and is thus not what you would  call a well-behaved DOS program.

The 80386 has hardware support for memory protection and 8086
emulation, it isn't a trick to make even a poorly-behaved DOS program
run fine (well -- generally), although access to devices obviously
must be arbitrated somehow.  So far as I know, every UNIX for the
80386 has or can have virtual 8086 processes.

|My only peeves are:

My only peeve is that the display machine at the recent Engineering
Workstation Conference in Boston was guarded by an IBM suit-and-tie
who scowled at me and refused to allow me to try anything (he was
quite rude).  Interestingly, the same employee was unable to give me
any information about AIX, nor even to identify that PS/2-80 as such.
Why he was at the conference is a mystery to me.

While I hear a lot of good things about AIX from its users, its
limitation to PS/2 hardware is annoying (although, like SunOS on the
386i, expected).  The demo machine at the conference was having
trouble staying up, too, so my impression of AIX was not a good one.
Even so, I'd give a lot for job control on the 386, I'm missing my old
386i.

jim frost
software tool & die
madd@bu-it.bu.edu