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From: rogerk@mips.COM (Roger B.A. Klorese)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mips
Subject: Re: Advice Sought on MIPS Machines
Message-ID: <36680@mips.mips.COM>
Date: 5 Mar 90 19:09:54 GMT
References: <1990Mar3.073759.10@sdsu.edu> <17755@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Sender: news@mips.COM
Reply-To: rogerk@mips.COM (Roger B.A. Klorese)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 52

I'd like to add some "informed" detail to some of George Hartzell's points.
Obviously, I'm somewhat biased ;-) in Mips' favor...

In article <17755@boulder.Colorado.EDU> hartzell@boulder.Colorado.EDU (George Hartzell) writes:
>  >3. Disk Drives:   Have you had any trouble using third party SCSI
>  >   & 8mm.	  drives such as Imprimis Wren V,VI, VII etc. or
>  >		  using Exabyte 8mm drives?
>
>We use SMD drives.  Don't know about SCSI on MIPS systems.

We use the Wren IV, Wren VI, and Exabyte ourselves.  Check with us on the
appropriate firmware revs.

>   1) curses/termcap stuff for BSD is a mess.  For example, its idea
>      of an efficient redraw (for an example from a book on 
>      curses) is to repaint the entire screen.  I punted and just
>      ported the 4.3bsd libcurses and libtermlib.  It's a pain 'cause I
>      have to maintain both terminfo and termcap databases, but at
>      least it works.

That's what we've done too.  The 4.50 SysV environment uses SVR3.2 terminfo,
and the BSD environment uses 4.3-Tahoe termcap.

>I think that my biggest complaint about MIPS is that they don't know
>the meaning or worth of an OPEN community.  They try to control
>everything for their machines by keeping stuff proprietary that is
>(formally or informally) common knowledge for other systems (e.g.
>their object file/symbol table format and the lack of a server and/or
>client side support in X11R4).  The result is that their systems are
>slightly outside the mainstream of the UNIX community, and don't
>directly benefit from the richness and experience that the community
>represents.

We are working on making more of this information available.  The symbol
table information is documented in the "MIPS Assembly Language Programmer's
Guide," though the .T file is not.  

As for X11R4, we are working on making the mips.cf file for clients
available; we should have word soon.  On the server side, though, we
have a case of "too much too soon": we are working on server
enhancements for as-yet-unannounced systems, on X11R4 compatibility,
and on performance optimization at the same time.  Perhaps larger
companies would ship this as a bunch of separate releases.  Simply put,
we just don't have the bandwidth through our QA/Test/Release group to
do this, so we find ourselves "batching" things into larger packages
than you (or I, as a user) might like.  This will change with growth, I
believe.
-- 
ROGER B.A. KLORESE      MIPS Computer Systems, Inc.      phone: +1 408 720-2939
MS 4-02    928 E. Arques Ave.  Sunnyvale, CA  94086             rogerk@mips.COM
{ames,decwrl,pyramid}!mips!rogerk                                 "I'm the NLA"
"Two guys, one cart, fresh pasta... *you* figure it out." -- Suzanne Sugarbaker