Does Microport offer Updates to its users?

[Timothy Murphy]

In <1737 at ssbn.WLK.COM> bill at ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) writes:

>In 1988 my article described
>the Microport effort "I would not dignify it by calling it excrement".
>The software was lousy, support non-existant, and documentation print
>quality very poor (there was even an apology for that enclosed).
...
>The happiest I ever was with V/386 was when the UPS driver carried
>it away, I'd hide and lock the doors if I thought he might bring me another
>Microport effort...  Caveat emptor isn't enough, you have to push it
>through banner first onto billboard size paper.
and much else in similar tone.

This is ridiculously unfair.
I've been running Microport Unix V/386 for a couple of years now,
and feel it's a pretty good product -- certainly for the price.
It's not the best Unix I've seen, but it's not the worst either.
Support was a bit laughable, I agree,
but I didn't really expect more.
(I will always remember the classic reply I got from US support,
'I guess what you've got there is some sort of hardware fault,
or it may be a software bug,'
in a very slow drawl.

Microport is the nearest I've seen
to a really cheap home Unix system.
(I've heard BSD/386 is on the way,
with AT&T code cut out,
so maybe that will be the answer.)



-- 

Timothy Murphy  

e-mail: tim at maths.tcd.ie