using Vax as fileserver for Xerox Lisp machine

[Dana S. Nau]

In article <354 at tove.UUCP> steve at tove.UUCP (Steve D. Miller) writes:
>... If I was doing
>lisp, I'd say, "hang the vax, I want a Dandelion," regardless of whether I
>could log into a unix machine with it (I suggest that someone from Xerox
>clarify the situation here; I'm not an Interlisp hacker -- merely an admirer
>-- and I'm getting my information secondhand from an Interlisp hacker here).

I'm not so enthusiastic.  I have a Dandelion at U. of Maryland, but I've
pretty much given up on it.  Here's why:

(1) I'm used to digging in and learning things on my own, but I found it
pretty difficult to learn Interlisp from the Interlisp manual--especially
without the availability of source code.

(2) On my machine, Interlisp crashed quite often--and every time it crashed,
Interlisp had to be re-installed by booting XDE and using an XDE tool
to read Lisp from the file server.

(3) Every time we reinstalled and rebooted Interlisp, we found that it had
lost the files on the local disk.  This isn't supposed to happen--and
doesn't happen on the other Maryland machines that run Interlisp.  Nobody in
my department could figure out what was wrong, and about the only support
that Xerox gave us was to say "wait and see if things get any better when
you install the next release."

At this point I gave up.  I'd be willing to reconsider if some of these
problems were solved--but so far, it doesn't look like that's going to
happen.
-- 
	Dana S. Nau (dsn at rochester)
	from U. of Maryland, on sabbatical at U. of Rochester