HP-720 vs IBM-320 vs Sparc2

[Alex Martelli]

rhodesii at idaho.uucp (III) writes:
	(a detailed and informative review)

Thanks for the work you put into this!  I'd just like to pick a few nits and
contribute my own personal observations and biases...

:Immediate disclaimer. I'm an expert in nothing, just a user
:who had a chance to demo an HP-720 for 10 days and had a
:chance to compare it to our IBM-320 and SUN Sparc2.
On the other hand, I come from years with HP /300, /400, /500, etc etc, as
well as with Sun /3 and /4 and IBM 6150 and 6000 (we ported our apps to the
latter right after GA, at an IBM center).  So maybe my viewpoint reflects
more of what one perceives after long experience, rather than first imp.s'...

:    2. The HP menu driven system administrator, "SAM" seems to
:       be quite good and much easier to use than the IBM
:       equivalent "SMIT" which I found just to get in the way
:       more times than to be helpful. It took very little time
Me, I prefer SMIT - apart from the clumsy human interface, at least it
can build a SCRIPT which you can then study and tailor (very necessary
with IBM given the indifferent quality of their rambling, vast docs - on
the other hand HP docs are first-rate, pity you didn't get them!).  It
also does logging.

:    5. HP-VUE 2.0  -I liked it. The workspace concept is good. I was
:       also able to blow it away and get my own X environment up easily.
:       The IBM Desktop manager thing is very poor in comparison.
Yes, but VUE is just TOO MUCH of a RAM hog!  Well, maybe with 32megs...

:   1. keyboard- had a nice "touch," but the ESC and shift keys are
:      just too small. Hopefully they will offer it with other keyboards.
I'm VERY much used to the HP layout (all the way from HP2393A's...) and I
love it, can't stand those ESC keys way up on the left, I risk left pinky
dislocation on ESC-intensive heavy typing (both vi and Emacs qualify!).
I second your motion for MORE END-USER CHOICE!!! on keyboards, on all
machines - whyohwhy don't they just adopt, say, the IBM-PC/AT kb interface
so one can buy Northgate or whatever keyboards!

:   2. I'm disappointed that HP doesn't support an 8mm tape drive (EXABYTE) on
:      the 720. It appears that they have decided that the four formats
:      they will support will be: CD-ROM, 4mm DAT, 1/2 inch and HP 1/4 inch.
Ditto, I like exabyte and (for data interchange) *standard* quarter-inch, I
love Sun/Sony/IBM/Olivetti/etc who are all going for those, and weep at HP and
DEC going their way with DAT and (different) proprietary quarter-inch tapes.

:   4. Symbolic debugger- The symbolic debugger adb seemed to be powerful,
:      but I was REALLY discouraged because the syntax is so much different 
:      from the dbx on most other UN*X boxes and the window driven part is 
I hope you mean xdb, adb is really NOT for application debugging, but rather
for kernel and assembly-level hacking!  Anyway I share your opinion, xdb is
really powerful BUT *impossible* to adapt to coming from dbx with its simple
friendly syntax (and multiplatform guys like me which have to dbx all day on
Sun/Sony/IBM/DEC *HATE* having to switch to completely different syntax for
HP's powerful xdb, just as much as for, say, AT&T's original wimpy sdb...).
PLEASE, HP, GIVE US A DBX-SYNTAX-LIKE FRONT-END TO XDB!!!

:   7.  The fortran compiler (quietly sometimes) links into the C library.
:       Sometimes it warns you, e.g.
:Warning on line 58354 of testcomp.f: Wrong number of args to intrinsic free
:       Last time I looked, free was not an f77 intrinsic. This meant that
:       I had to go in and add external statements so it would use MY
:       subroutine free. O.K. I know that if trying to write good, 
:       PORTABLE FORTRAN  code, one should always declare one's function 
:       to be external, for just this circumstance, but there is a lot of 
:       code out there where people don't.
IBM's even worse in a way - if you do mixed C/Fortran, there are some 
duplicate entries in recent xlf, such as SYSTEM(), that will quietly link
a call to system() in your C code to the SYSTEM() entry in the fortran lib,
resulting in weird and wondrous crashes (you have to explicitly put -lc to
avoid this).  Whyohwhy don't all Fortran compilers do it like Sun, DEC, etc,
putting an extra underline after the routine name to get the symbol entry -
voila, no more risk of cross-language confusion!

:      After fsplitt'ing this puppy I then ran into trouble with the
:      csh file globbing.
:         f77 *.f
:      would only work with up to 104 files. Any more and it just gave up.
Etc etc, well I have a constructive suggestion for you here, use xargs(1): it
will read, for example, filenames from standard input, and pass them on as
commandline arguments in manageable chunks, e.g.:

	ls|grep '\.f$'|xargs f77 -c

will turn all of your .f's into .o's, no matter how many there are.  You will
then have to similarly collect them onto a few .a's for linking; it can be
done, though of course it's not as convenient as just having unlimited 
numbers of args to a command.

:    2. For symbolic links ln requires two args instead of
:       the 2nd being optional. i.e. you can't just ln -s ../foo
:       but must use ln -s ../foo foo
:       (I hate extra typing).
Well, I hate inconsistent interfaces even more!  Since, for example, 'cp' 
requires the target arg, so should ln, with or without -s.  I believe this
is enshrined in the Posix standard, so it's probably coming to all boxes...

:However, overall the HP-UNIX seemed a little crude compared to 
:the IBM AIX and the SUNOS as well. This surprised me since I 
:thought after acquiring Apollo that HP acquired a few years worth 
:of UNIX experience as well and that it would be more robust.
Even since ell before Apollo acquisition, HP has MANY years of unix experience.
I guess you just don't like System-V flavoured Unix... but I bet you will get
more used to it, what with the coming SV-flavoured Posix standards...

:I am glad to see that HP sells the 720 with a minimum of 16 Meg.
:We bought our IBM with 16 and after several frustrating months
:increased it to 32 Meg (3rd party). If IBM had been upfront about
:the memory requirements before hand we would have just gotten 32
:Meg to start with and be done with it. Anyway IBM sells the 320
:in an 8 Meg. configuration which I can't believe even has room
:for the operating system :-)
IBM does not sell 8-meg machines any more, 16 megs is now the minimum
configuration, I believe.

Again, thanks for your informative comments!
-- 
Alex Martelli - CAD.LAB s.p.a., v. Stalingrado 53, Bologna, Italia
Email: (work:) martelli at cadlab.sublink.org, (home:) alex at am.sublink.org
Phone: (work:) ++39 (51) 371099, (home:) ++39 (51) 250434; 
Fax: ++39 (51) 366964 (work only), Fidonet: 332/407.314 (home only).