🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan3.235327.13718@qb.rhein-main.de>, vhs@rhein-main.de (Volker Herminghaus-Shirai) writes:

| (Additional menu items for move, resize, etc that are useless if you have
| a mouse since no one in his sane mind would use them then.)
| The video-mode desaster is another example. I have yet to see a workstation
| that keeps switching between "text-mode" and a horrendous amount of
| "graphics-modes" (except for the RS6000, which does text/graphics mode. Sigh.

  I have yet to see a non-accelerated workstation which did scrolling of
text windows as fast as a dedicated text mode. Since you are moving less
data with a hardware supported text mode it will always be faster,
unless you deliberately cripple the hardware to make a point.

  I prefer to do long interractive editing (like writing articles and
books) on a text screen because of this. It definitely has uses.

| A decent workstation has IMHO *at least* the following items of which the
| software can and does take advantage of:
| 	a high-resolution screen
| 	a pointing device
| 	an ethernet connection (or token ring if your management was bribed ;-)
| 	a UN*X operating system with TCP/IP support and a C compiler
| 	a boot prom that allows for interactive diagnosis etc.
| 	a decent amount of RAM and hard disk space
| 	a tape drive for backups and data exchange as opposed to floppy disk
| 	other items I may have forgotten (it's already tomorrow...;-)
| 
| Software writers are usually driven to write for the lowest reasonable
| common denominator, so if any of the above items don't exist in the base
| configuration of a workstation line, forget at least 50% of their usefulness
| if you have them. (E.g. >50 AIX or SCO UNIX installation disks vs. one tape.
| Newer releases may give you one or two floppies and a tape, but still no
| delivery on CD-ROM, as far as I see. Also no installing via ethernet, since
| not everybody has it, etc.)

  Your "far as I can see" should get glasses. SCO has been shipping on
CD for years, and Dell has been supporting network install for several
years, too. For ease of install I would rate Dell first, then Sun and
SCO tied, and HP-UX down a good bit from that.

  Sun beats SCO for ease of network setup, but that's because you can't
offer choices without having either menus or prompts. Installing a smart
net card on a Sun, like 4/670 for instance, a small server, is more
complex than adding a net card to SCO.

  I can remember installing V7 on a PDP-11, and it startet with toggling
the boot so the paper tape could be read to boot the magnetic media...
we have made progress in the last few decades.
-- 
bill davidsen, GE Corp. R&D Center; Box 8; Schenectady NY 12345
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