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From: ron@woan.austin.ibm.com (Ronald S. Woan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Multiple monitors (was: Xerox sues Apple!)
Keywords: concede a little to MAC world
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Date: 2 Jan 90 17:49:17 GMT
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I'd like to clear this up once and for all with a summary of what has
been said on this subject:

1. Original (pro-MAC) poster notes that MACII supports multiple
monitors as one contiguous (i.e. same picture spans multiple monitors)
video space.

He is right. We can't do this in the MSDOS world (at least I've never
seen it done for general software, of course you can always doctor
your own software to do this). In the MSDOS arena we can only have
dissimilar multi-monitors (i.e. color and mono displays) hooked
simultaneously without special drivers and exotic hardware. That's all
you need for multi-screen debugging; I love debugging graphics
programs from my monochrome monitor.

I am willing to concede that this is a neat feature of the Mac II?
that is difficult to duplicate even with UNIX (AIX or Interactive are
the ones I am familiar with) and X-Windows. However, how many people
really need an application to span multiple monitors? Its aweful
difficult to visualize a picture crossing monitor boundaries though it
make for a neat effect at dance clubs. Just go out and get a bigger
one. If you just want a pseudo-contiguous workspace across monitors
(mouse moves off one monitor to the next at the edges), which is a far
more normal task, this is easily done with any of the X-Window
implementations by running multiple servers and having a client that
effects the switch when the mouse cursor reaches the proper edge.

Anyway, PC-Clones make a marvelously cost-effective UNIX box for less
than the price of a base MAC II system configuration. Previous posting
have confirmed that $3500 will get you a decent 25MHz base UNIX
configuration. Actually, even a real IBM machine could make sense for
those in the University setting. Last time I looked, IBM was offering
~40% University discount to students (at Berkeley when I was there
last year) on '386 hardware and tossing in full AIX/PS2 (TCP/IP, NFS,
X-Windows, etc..) for only an additional $250 (discount of something
like $2000). I believe that they would even pre-install the software
like Sun.

On the OS2 front, there was some talk on making OS2 POSIX compliant
next year which is not possible with MultiFinder 7.0 because it does
not support pre-emptive context switching. Check it out in Byte.

					Ron
 
+-----All Views Expressed Are My Own And Are Not Necessarily Shared By------+
+------------------------------My Employer----------------------------------+
+ Ronald S. Woan  (IBM VNET)WOAN AT AUSTIN, (AUSTIN)ron@woan.austin.ibm.com +
+ outside of IBM       @cs.utexas.edu:ibmchs!auschs!woan.austin.ibm.com!ron +