Differences Between a Unix-pc and Convergent Miniframe

[John Kellow]

I'm new to this group and I've been picking up a lot of useful information.
I don't actually own unix-pc and I've never seen one in person but I do
use a Convergent Miniframe which I guess was the machine on which the
unix-pc was based.  Just what exactly are some of the differences between
the two?

I looked up an old article in Byte and saw a picture of a unix-pc and
the keyboard looks very similar to a convergent terminal (with plus or
minus a few keys).  Is the built-in display in fact just a built in
terminal?  I know convergent made a graphics terminal that has support
for a windowing environment.  The graphics terminals have two serial
ports that can be accessed as regular devices, is the mouse connected
to one and the built-in modem to the other?

I don't think that the Miniframe has loadable device drivers or shared
libraries.  I'm running CTIX 3.20, how does that compare to whatever
the unix-pc is running?  I think 3.20 is the last version of CTIX for the
miniframe that convergent released.  I haven't had any problems with it.
I can't say that there are any major bugs.  Does the unix-pc support TCP/IP?
I have that on the Miniframe, but the impression I've got from reading
some postings is that the Unix-pc doesn't have it.  Someone mentioned
something about having a hard time porting X because of all of the network
stuff.  I have a socket library but it only supports AF_INET, not AF_UNIX.
Also, the names of a lot of the routines are changed because they're so
long, and some of the include files don't seem to be the same as on a Sun.

That brings up another point, what about long identifiers?  The compilers
will accept long identifiers but only the first 8 characters are unique.
Is this a problem on the Unix-PC?  I've hacked up some scripts and things
to replace long identifiers but they don't always work well.  Thats been
my biggest problem in getting public domain software to work.

Also how can I tell exactly what revision board I have?  There was something
in the Unix-PC archives about finding that out with adb, but I couldn't
get that to work.  CTIX 3.20 clearly supports two hard disks, theres device
entries and everything, but I can't tell if my hardware supports that or
not.  85 Mb Hitachi and Micropolis drives are also supported, but thats
on a Miniframe plus which I don't think I have.

What do you do with ISAM?  Is there some application that uses it or are
you just supposed to write your own applications?

Any other Miniframe owners out there?  I was on the Convergent list
but there was hardly any traffic and most of it was for the newer machines.
Was the Miniframe just an OEM product or did they actually sell it to
people?

Just thought I'd try to get a discussion going on the Miniframe (I'm really
glad I found this group).


John Kellow
kellow at ndcheg.cheg.nd.edu