ad-hominem attacks go to hell

[David F. Carlson]

In a recent posting someone flamed John Plocher for being a Microport
stooge.  After the fire-play of/about Dimitri recently I would like to make
an appeal to keep the ad-hominem attacks off this forum.  It is unproductive
and hurtful.

For the benefit of those who have just started to deal with Microport:

John Plocher *used* to be very active in the user community organizing
bug lists, source archives and moderated the Microport maillist that
was the predecessor of this forum.  Last month he moved
from Wisconsin to California to work harder at making Microport work.
I feel he should have the chance to get his shit together before people
flame him for decisions made up to two years before he joined there.
I have great hope that by getting concerned and interested people into 
Microport, things will get better.  John has shown himself in this and
other forums as working for a better UNIX for Intel.  Best of luck, John.

There is no doubt that the Intel 80286 processor in the IBM PC/AT environment
is a son-of-a-gun to support.  No doubt.  Serial boards using the 8250 
chip have notorious interrupt noise immunity coupled with an outrageously
small 64K kernel stack and a very expensive context switching mechanism
makes for real headaches in the serial device drivers.  I have looked at
the serial device driver code and have wrung my hands at the double panics
but it is a rock and a hard place situation--no one wins.  At 9600 baud
you will have an interrupt every millisecond.  The service routine for pushing
current context, completing the interrupt polling of the uart, and getting
out cleanly consumes very close to 1 millisecond.  So, you lose keyboard
interrupts, or the floppy drive has multiple timeouts, or the interrupt
stack grows while in another driver's critical region until the 64K stack
overflows (aka, protection fault or double fault).  What a mess.

The 386 product is much better from a computer engineering viewpoint.  I
would recommend SV/AT only for hackers, masocists and cheapskates.  We
used it commercially for over a year with multiple users and full usenet
support.  I ported news 2.10.4 here in September of '86 months before those
at site uport even knew it existed.  I made 16 bit compress work without
source manipulations--I was impressed that a toy computer could actually
download 2Meg of news at night--and still stay up for a month at a time!

My company under my recommendation junked SV/AT in favor of the *much* better 
386 UNIX which has performed admirably in the 9 months we have supported it.
If anyone needs serious UNIX, buy SV/386.

So please people, ad-hominem attacks get us no where.  Good accurate, verified
bug reports with hardware, ROM rev., system config, reproducable circumstances
gets a software product better.

Best of luck in your new job John.  Don't lose patience.

Yours for a *better* Intel family UNIX,

-- 
David F. Carlson, Micropen, Inc.
micropen!dave at ee.rochester.edu

"The faster I go, the behinder I get." --Lewis Carroll