Thanks for the flames!

[Earle R. Horton]

In article <7937 at apple.Apple.Com>, jk at Apple.COM (John Kullmann) writes:
> GEEZ! I am having fun yet or WHAT!!!!  All this entertainment watching
> a few UNIX dweebs and twits in a flame-fest like I've never seen and I
> don't even have to pay for it!!  John Gilmore gets the honors for the
> most flames in a batch, and Geoff get the honors for the silliest flame,
> to wit:
> >
> >According to what I've read, the "obvious thing" you are missing is this:
> >
> >	A/UX is a schmuck, second-rate, half-baked product.
...
> -- 
> John Kullmann

     I would have to agree with John that calling A/UX "schmuck, second
rate" is silly.  But "half-baked"?  Let's look at this a bit, shall we?
Sure, A/UX has lots of potential, and the ToolBox should allow for lots
of nifty graphics and applications to be developed someday.  The problem
here, however, is this: We have A/UX, but we can't get any memory!  We
did manage to get a 1 Meg kit, so now we have a Mac II running A/UX with
enough space for maybe 4 user processes after we get all our network
junk going.  Definitely half-baked, and the needed upgrade kit is
nowhere in sight.  The minimum hardware configuration for A/UX is 2 Meg
of RAM, exactly, and they ship it with the sources for GNU EMACS!  Gnu
emacs runs in about 700k of core in most systems, and I have to call my
VMS copy of it "microemacs" so the system administrator won't look too
closely at how much of system resources I am consuming (he's touchy
about that).  And if he knew I ran it as a sub-job of my login!  Gnu
emacs runs on a Mac II with 2 Meg, but after you get more than about a
page of text loaded, it's freak-out time.  Try "control-H-t" so you can
get the tutorial, then watch your login session die!  And so it goes.
The latest thing I discovered is there is no vt200 terminfo entry!
Sure, it's in /etc/termcap, but half the programs use terminfo instead!
"Man" won't run if you login and do "eval `tset -s vt200`".  Incredible!

     Yes, we are dealing with a half-baked system here.  There are
utilties which don't work, there are delays in shipment of hardware and
manuals, and there is no way to write to an 800k HFS disk.  (Here's a
tip, make an 800k MFS disk if you want to import lots of stuff from your
other Mac.)

     There is another point which you are missing, however, and that is
this:  UNIX systems are suppposed to be half-baked!  The whole idea
behind a UNIX system is to provide employment for dweebs and twits, so
that they can hack it into a semblance of something useful!  If it came
completely baked, then there wouldn't be too much that dweebs and twits
could do with it, and they would all be out of a job!  Think about it,
would you like for Apple to appear so competent and professional in the
production of their products that there would be no need to hire people
to make them actually work?

     Conclusion:  Half-baked products keep programmers employed, and
they are likely to do so for a long time.  If you don't like A/UX, then
Apple has a solution for you.  It's called "Apple HD SC Setup".

-- 
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*Earle R. Horton, H.B. 8000, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755   *
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