Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!emory!mephisto!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!ukc!icdoc!qmw-cs!liam
From: liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aux
Subject: Re: Hopefully not too stupid a question...
Message-ID: <1589@sequent.cs.qmw.ac.uk>
Date: 2 Feb 90 21:51:55 GMT
References: <6787@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> <1990Feb1.054457.13492@noao.edu> <6845@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
Reply-To: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Organization: Computer Science Dept, Queen Mary and Westfield College, U of London, UK.
Lines: 41
Summary:
Expires:
Sender:
Followup-To:
Distribution:
Keywords:

In article <6845@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> ee299bw@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (Help On The Way) writes:
>However, the Mac also has many strengths: the standardization
>of some features across applications, the big screen on my mac
>(MegaGraphics 19") required NO reconfiguration of .STUPID files,
>most of the applications are quite good, Networking Macs is a piece
>of cake (at least at AppleTalk speeds)... the list goes on. I was
>hoping that AU/X would buy me out of the other annoyances, not to
>mention allow two or possibly three users to share a Mac....

The screen stuff does work under A/UX, without any .STUPID
files. You still get the stpuid behaviour if you run an
Application on a big screen (we have the Apple 2 Page displays)
then go back to an ordinary Mac II screen and the grow box is
off the screen so you can't make the window any smaller :-)

Networking Macs is still probably easy, IF you buy "AppleTalk
for A/UX" or "EtherTalk for A/UX" - these may be different
things. **** APPLE: WHY HAVE YOU UNBUNDLED THIS STUFF? *****
Networking Unix machines normally means TCP/IP and so you have
all of the hassles with choosing a network number (even if you
only have one network) and choosing node numbers and
maintaining hosts lists. RARP helps a little but not much.
AppleTalk over Ethernet runs at Ethernet speeds but with
standard Mac ease of networking.

>two or possibly three users to share a Mac....

Then it's not "personal computing" :-)
Actually this is technically feasible since you can add more
mice and keyboards to ADB, a Mac II has lots of slots for extra
video cards, but the snag would be getting more A/UX consoles
to work and having multiple mac applications which don't share
anything much. I don't expect Apple will lose sleep over this...


-- 

William Roberts                 ARPA: liam@cs.qmw.ac.uk
Queen Mary & Westfield College  UUCP: liam@qmw-cs.UUCP
Mile End Road                   AppleLink: UK0087
LONDON, E1 4NS, UK              Tel:  01-975 5250 (Fax: 01-980 6533)