Bell Tech Unix Review #2

[Larry Williamson]

This is a review of my experience with the Bell Tech Unix.

Our system configuration is as follows:
    Intel 386 16Mhz Motherboard comes with
        512K memory on board
        1 serial port
        1 parellel port
    2 Meg memory on the 32 bit bus
    60 Meg Priam drive
    1 RA2 Western Digital RLL controller card
    8 port smart serial card (Intellicon-8)
    1 dumb serial port (8250 based)
    1 BLIT express graphics processor
    1 Monochrome display adapter (system console)
    1 monochrome monitor (console)
    1 Sony multisync monitor
    Bell Tech's Unix with X10.4
    
This is a summary of some of my experiences over the past 4-6 weeks that
I've been working with this system.

First let me say that I am comparing this to Microport's 286 based system
V/AT. This 286 system I've been using since last November.

What BTU does not have:
. no nroff/troff
. no man pages
. no doscp, dosdir, etc
. no virtual consoles (you get this in X10.4, but that is not the same)
. no ksh
. no fortran (not that i'd use it if it were there :-)
  although you do get the fortran libraries (3F)
. no kermit (C-Kermit (4D 061) ported pretty easy, only a few
  syntax errors to clear up)
. no cmos ram update commands (ie. setup in uport)
  if you want to modify the realtime clock or other
  cmos ram parameters, you must write your own program. It's not very
  difficult. The first thing I did after installing the system was to
  write just such a tool.)
. no key remapping functions (ie. keyset, setkey in uport)
  cannot modify the keycodes for the function/cursor keys. If you like
  emacs, you will not be able to use the cursor keys.
. So far our Everex Streamer (QIC36 interface card, long card) does not
  work. The tape driver is 'just a little different'. I don't know yet
  for sure if it is a bt problem

Weaknesses:
. floppy access is SLOW. cpio & tar are 3-4 times slower than uport/286
. system seems slow in some ways 
  . always swapping
  . lots of disk access
  . I have 2.5 meg memory 60 Meg disk
. does not support RLL
  . Oh yea, they say that they support RLL, but it's a farce. I've got the
    industry standard Western Digital RA2 controller board that BT says
    they support. I've got the Intel 386 16Mhz mother board that BT says
    they support. This is the SAME combination that BT ships if you buy
    their hardware! Unix does not recoginize that there are 26 sectors/track
    on the disk. I'm stuck with 17. BT says I need a special rom that will
    define a drive type that has 26 sectors per track. I should by this from
    intel, they say. Intel says, "a what? never heard of it!".

Other problems
. documentation is backordered (>6weeks so far)
  . they will give you a credit on the manuals if you can buy
    them locally, but the credit is a lot less that what the manuals
    will actually cost you.
  . These manuals are essentially the same AT&T Unix SystemV/386 manuals
    printed by Prentice Hall. BT has some additional detail added to the
    manuals.
  . They are not the usual loose leaf, 3 ring binder in a box type manuals.
  . You cannot leave a manual open on the desk at your reference page. It
    will flip shut on you.

Positives
---------

What you do get.
. an interesting online help system. (good if you have some new unix users
  at your site)
. X10.4 (not quite as nice as X11, but a good start)
. Full BNU system. I had no idea how much easier uucp could be to manage
  using BNU. (this is basically Honey DanBer uucp).

Other items.
. So far, everything that i've ported from our uport 286 system to this
  system has ported easily. usually just a recompile. 
. any commands that i've brought from the 286 system has run without
  a recompile. Very nice if you've bought something and can't recompile it.
. Our favourite smart serial card works like a charm in this machine
  (the Intellicon-8 from Connect Tech)
. the onboard serial port and a dumb 8250 based serial port both work with
  the default serial drivers. This seeems to be a trouble spot for some.
. Sales support and Tech support have so far been very good. Sales support
  is a shining example (but of course they want more of our money!) Tech
  support is good too, even though my biggest tech problem has been trying
  to get my industry standard Western Digital RA2 RLL controller to work
  with this system.

Other items:

. With 2.5Meg ram, this system is SLOW. It runs any given program nice
and fast, compress, cc, whatever. But there is not enough ram for the
system and a few other processes, so it is always swapping something.

To be fair, I must admit that I am running X-windows all the time, and
X is BIG.

If I leave emacs running in one window, and switch to another window to
do a make or test my application, then there is a lot of disk activity
even before I get a prompt in the next window.

I would suggest that BTU + X-Windows REQUIRES at least 4 Meg memory.

Disk utilization is quite high.  The 60Meg disk is nearly full (about
80% in / and 70% in /usr).  This is with the entire distribution
including the 10 floppies of X-windows stuff. 

The documentation that comes with X is minimal. It is no way to learn how
to use X. I ordered the X-windows manuals from O'Reilly & Assoc. These are
great. Unfortunately, these manuals are for X11, not the X10 you get from BT.
(BT, if you are listening. I hear you are thinking about shipping X11. If
this is true, get the O'Reilly manuals and ship them with your system!!)

At $60.00 for the pair, these manuals are expensive. But they are very 
thorough, about two and a half inches in total thickness (makes you feel
you are getting something for your money).

We bought the BLIT express card with the system. We needed a display
system that would display 256 level (64 for now is enough) grey scale.
The ads for the BLIT card implied that it would do this.

		It does not. It can not.

The very best it can do with out any additional hardware is 4 grey
levels.  Actually it can only display 64 colours with the current
hardware and software configuration.  The blit card puts out 2 bits of
video for each of the red, green and blue channels.  Therefore, you get
only 4 levels of each of these colours. 

Our application is a network of a number of unix machines each with
a high res grey scale display. We are displaying grey scale images from
a central high capacity archive. We require a minimum of 64 levels of grey
and would like to claim 256 levels (even if this is beyond human eye 
perception).

RLL support and grey scale support are both essential to the viability of 
our application. I suspect that the blit express will not do the job for
us. Too bad because it does look very good. 

Larry
-- 
Larry Williamson                      Focus Automation Systems
UUCP: watmath!focsys!larry    608 Weber St. N, Waterloo, Ontario N2V 1K4
                                          +1 519 746 4918