life after death (of uport)

[Vernon Schryver]

A long note comparing 3.0e and 2.0.2 in which ISC is found acceptible:

After having difficulty getting a new Logitech bus mouse working with
DOSMerge 1.1+3.0e, and feeling abondoned, I ordered from ISC in NH from
here in CA.  ISC's presales support was much better than the other amateur
UNIX houses I've dealt with.  They answered questions on the conservative
side of complete accuracy.  They care about answering the phone quickly.
The 75% offer is fair--they credited my full uport purchase price, but not
the $100 tape driver.  For $499.50 on a credit card, I got C, DWB, VP/ix,
manuals, $0 tax (out of state?  what about Santa Monica?), and UPS-blue.
(Oh, and something called "TEN/PLUS User Interface," which looks like
another case of MAC-envy, combined with raging emacs-is-the-universe.)

Without asking, an invoice came in the mail.  I always had to call uport
more than once for each purchase.  The post-sales support has been ok.
There have been none of the sullen, ever changing series of dishonest
answers to a single, repeated question that I so enjoyed from uport.  ISC
seems to prefer their 800 number, tho I offered to use my nickel.

ISC manuals are not as complete as Microport's.  They omit the important
half of DWB.   The paper bound volumes are much harder to use than uport or
AT&T binders, tho with better typography.  The wire-bound volumes are
terrible (bindings are always tangled; hard to close).  Some man-pages are
repeated.  Microport's release notes were too consise, but ISC's are too
verbose; I do not know which are/were worse.

The floppy driver is incredibly slow.  The filesystem is great, not
suffering from the ancient free list botch.  (The SDS 940 had bit maps;
there was no excuse for a free list in UNIX.)  The slow floppy makes
installation painfully slow--too bad they don't distribute tapes like
computer companies.  Their use of AT&T sysadm installation is nicer than
Microport's.  It took about 30 hard hours to move all of my stuff from
uport to ISC, and I'm an old kernel hack with daytime access to source.
UNIX is will not make it in the mass market until and unless this improves.

The 1/4" cartridge driver is wonderful.  No hangups.  No disabled
interrupts during rewind.  However, it is not available under DOS, making
VP/ix's file stuff even harder.  Uport's was available under DOS, but did
not work.  Like uport, mt(1) does not work, presumably because the driver
does not do standard ioctl's.  They do not document but do ship mt(1).
They do document but do not ship tapecntl(1).  They don't seem offer a
piece of offal like uport's tape(1) for rewinding, retensioning and
skipping, so I guess you have to hack your own.  I see no way to reset
the driver, but only a piece of junk like uport's tape driver needs that.

The 8 virtual consoles are nicer, but more awkward to use.  Since VP/ix
uses SYSREQ, they are still available with things like LOTUS, unlike uport
and DOSMerge.  I don't know what would help.

There is kernel evidence of Weitek support, but no documentation, no *.a.
Implausibly, there are no words about 387's.  Maybe they just work.

The at386 terminfo entry is broken--moria did not work--, but not as badly
as uport's.  Recall that even uport's at386 net postings were wrong.  ISC
includes terminfo source, making fixes easier.

There is a real csh, unlike the victim of AT&T lobotimization shipped by
uport.  By itself, this made the pain worthwhile.  No ksh, but I bet what
came with 3.0e would work.  The uport Greenhills C compiler works.

The 2.2 smail-/bin/{,l,r}mail ISC ships is kaput.  A sendmail port is
included, so with the publically available smail 2.5, you can fix things
better than you could with uport.

The ttymap(1) command does nothing for me.  The sample maps are trashed
with backspace characters.

The ISC asy driver is better than uport's--DTR does the right thing; no
lock-ups.  Watching a TB+ at 19.2 on a standard card hacked with 16550's in
a 20MHz Everex convinced me ISC has worse worst-case interrupt latency than
uport, causing the ISC asy driver to loose lots of characters, doing bad
things to TB+/UUCP through put.  It's easy to hack Jim Murray's P.D. driver
enough to fit, and it does much better, tho not as well as it did with
3.0e.  This is evidence of ISC or new AT&T SVR3.2 interrupt latency bugs.

VP/ix does not support background execution.  Almost no I/O redirection,
contrary to the VP/ix manual.  (For a good time, type "dir</dev/null"
Switch consoles & kill the shell to restore things).  This is silly, since
the hooks to support DOS on a plain tty should be smart enough to do
nothing if fd's 1&2 are pipes or closed.  Running DOS swill with make(1) is
a pain, tho possible.  VP/ix is far less flexible then DOSMerge, but it has
far fewer bugs.  Microsoft Word & Lotus work better, tho Word 5.0 cannot
understand the VP/ix image of the UNIX filesystem.  Word does understand
DOSMerge UNIX files.  (Note to ISC:  Microsoft has never heard of a
"multiuser Word;" the "network" Word is just paperwork.  This is a bug in
VP/ix, not "copy protection" in Word.)

I started calling Everex, ISC, et al because of mouse troubles.  Guess what
does not work with VP/ix?  A fix is promised in a future release and I
found a work-around, which kills the mouse under UNIX.  I guess I won't be
buying X for a while.  Still, ISC 2.0.2 is better than Microport 3.0e, so I
feel no remorse.  If you think will Microport rise from its ashes, it would
be reasonable to stay with them for the 2-3 years before SVR4 is usable in
this market.


Vernon Schryver
vjs at calcite.uucp     or   ...{pyramid,sgi}!sgi!calcite!vjs