Pity the poor 286 folk

[Jeff Mann]

In article <10770001 at hpcupt1.HP.COM> vandys at hpcupt1.HP.COM (Andrew Valencia(Seattle)) writes:
>In article <9695 at ico.ISC.COM> rcd at ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes:
>>...  I wanna run MS-word!
>>...
>>"there is NO support for ANY kind of networking with V/AT!"

Actually, it was me, not Dick Dunn, that said that.
>
>	Oh, come now.  It isn't THAT bad!  My wife is a writer and does just
>fine on our AT.  Microemacs, configured to a 'T' for her, along with tpr
>(which I hacked to give her the features she wanted) seems to carry a pro-
>fessional writer pretty well.  If her formatting needs ever get too fancy

Yeah, I've got uEmacs running here, and to me it seems great.  I don't know
*why* people in my office prefer to use MS-WORD on a DOS XT, but they do, and
there's no way I'm going to be able to convince them to learn a new word 
processor just so they can work on this machine instead.  For a professional
writer, like a professional programmer, the time spent learning a new system
is easily made up for by time saved by that (better) system.  But for the
casual user who just has to write a few letters every week, the overhead of
learning a new program isn't justifiable.  

My point is, how many software/hardware vendors are going to be interested in
making their product work with Microport?  And how much time and effort is
Microport going to be willing to put into improving the '286 port?  Not much! 
Only because the user base (sales potential) isn't there.  When (if?) the
merged XENIX compatible generic 386 UNIX is available, you can be sure that
there will be a multitude of device drivers and applications available.  For
instance, a TOPS interface so I can hook up all the Macs and Dos machines 
here.  And it's gonna run MS-WORD!  In terms of integrating a uPort '286
system into an existing "standard" office environment, well, it just ain't
possible.  And I'm not going to hold my breath.  But for specialized
applications, like the videotex database we are running on the V/AT here,
it's pretty good (if you can write your own code).  And of course it will
run most of the stuff off usenet.

>	I received an offer from uPort just a bit ago for a TCP/IP package.
>I'm not saying it worked, but I am saying I saw one for sale.  For that
>matter, I believe KA9Q's TCP/IP package works fine over 802.3, so there
                                                         ^^^^^
But there are no drivers available for this, as far as I know... are there?


-- 
| Jeff Mann - Inter/Access Videotex, Toronto  ...uunet!mnetor!intacc!mann  |
| "A picture is worth 256 thousand words"  {utzoo, utgpu}!chp!intacc!mann  |