🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <370003@col.hp.com> don@col.hp.com (Don Allison) writes:

>Here's the gist of the reply I tried to mail to George (which died on our
>mail server--couldn't figure out how to get to him):

Hmm...must be because I'm a newly-established uucp-only leaf node running
under MT C-Shell with it's own uucp? :-)  No internet-style addresses yet :-(

>(By the way I'm glad to hear that SOMEONE has had a good experience with
>MT C-shell and Beckemeyer...it's almost encouraged me to dig it out and
>try it again, given the amount of money I've invested in it)

I'm also surprised to finally see someone on Usenet who uses MT C-Shell
(well, at least previously :-).  David Beckemeyer is here on Usenet also
so you should be able to contact him with any problems (david@bdt.UUCP).
I'd be willing to give you some help if you like in hopefully getting
your system set up again with mtcsh.  (let's do email shall we?)

>I purchased everything that Beckemeyer put out for a while (C-shell, MT Csh,
>Micro C tools, RTX, ansiterm, vsh, etc, etc.) and upgraded every time I got
>a notice of a new version.  I spent a lot of money on their products, in
>general, and my overall impression in the end was unfavorable to the point
>that I no longer have MT C-shell vsh, ansiterm, etc on my hard disk (I do
>use some of the utilities from the c toolkit (whatever it was called) with
>Gulam).

I too purchased just about everything from Beckemeyer (about $300-400 Cdn!)
including HD Sentry (I'm planning to also get HD Toolkit from them -
comments on this?).  At first, I had problems with installing stuff like
uucp and also some of the documentation is skimpy at times.  But luckily
enough, I referred myself to the standard unix doc's from third-party
sources...and it's still on my hd ;-) (but I have only about 5megs left on my
16meg mtcsh partition!)

>...(stuff about skimpy docs deleted)...
>starting multiuser mode, my modem went into permanent off-hook...turns out
>I wanted to run single user multitasking but they were expecting a login
>from the rs-232 port and were running a getty, which was in an infinite
>loop echoing to the modem which was echoing to the getty, which was...this was
>not documented anywhere, I got lucky and finally figured out how to
>permanently kill the getty), 2) non-UNIXlike operation (in trying to fix
>the previous problem, I did an init 1, wanting to go to single user
>multitasking...unfortunately that was single user single tasking, and
>things like piping to lp no longer worked!  :-(  I was not pleased.),

Hmm...I'm using mtcsh 1.2 and I don't find that 'getty-echoing' (?) problem
you mentioned...yes, the problem of not being about to spool to the printer
when running init1 is sort of dumb...but oh well...I use init2 most of the
time anyhow.

>3) generally slow, sluggish feel, 4) a lot of utilities I had come to know and
>expect in a unix-like environment missing (this was really frustrating,
>...

Ahh, but after using Minix for a bit, I immediately went back to mtcsh!
If you think mtcsh is slow (which I believe it really isn't that slow at
all) , Minix is even worse (and I couldn't even install
it onto my hd - trashed a 16meg partition in the process - luckily it was
empty but I couldn't use it after...but that's another story :-).
Well, I had to do a bit of software-searching on bdt's bbs, other bbs's, and
more recently, Usenet and it's archive-servers (atari st, unix, etc) in order
to supplement the not-too-many utilities included in mtcsh.

>...and worst of all, 5) the system kept
>crashing when I tried to do almost ANYTHING (ESPECIALLY vsh! This was

Well, for me not really almost ANYTHING but some things!  After all, we're
working with a 68000 with has no memory protection and some of the regular
tos/gem prgs out there aren't really well...programmed well.  The only
problem I came across in vsh was when I tried to save the parameters of how
the windows were positioned/located - it would crash if I tried to boot it
up after that.  I mentioned it to David and he promptly fixed in a matter of
weeks...

>My experience (and what I have heard from friends) indicates that if you
>want a cheap unix-like environment, buy a PC and MKS-Toolkit...this is
>single tasking but does support pipes, etc, and feels WONDERFULLY like
>unix!  It has vi, awk, grep, etc, etc--all the things you know and love.

I heard some pretty good things about that also - their ads in Byte also prove
mks-toolkit to be very complete and well-thought out...alas, that's in the
pc world...we'll have to do with what we have on the ST...

>If you really want multitasking, consider using MINIX (I have friends
>who are having fun playing with it, personally I have never used it on

Fun?  Playing with 'that'? :-)  No way...as I said before, it's slow and
there are installation problems on hd's.  It might be
ok for the serious unix hobbyist but not for the guy who wants to use most of
his tos/gem stuff (given that it won't crash under mtcsh) and multitask
without the hassle of recompiling half of the kernel in order to make things
work to some extent....

>an ST so I can't speak from experience here) along with the Free Software
>Foundation tools--c compiler, flex, bison, emacs, etc.

Turns out that flex, bison, and emacs is available for the ST, and it runs
under mtcsh 'cause I have 'em!  I hear the gnu c compiler doesn't work because
of gnu-c not recognizing environment variables declared through mtcsh, but I
use Mark Williams C (3.0.5) and it works fine along with those other gnu
utilities.

>These are just my opinions and impressions, I'd be interested in hearing
>what others tell you about their experiences.

I haven't heard from other mtcsh users yet.  I've seen some on the bdt bbs
but with long-distance charges cropping up for me as they always are, I don't
usually call bdt bbs that much.  Those and other users should be able to
get on some sort of public access unix system and be able to view
comp.sys.atari.st and hopefully share their thoughts...

>(One other frustrating thing was that when they announced on-line manual
>pages, I immediately sent them an order, along with a check.  A few
>months later, they sent me a notice telling me that I could be a beta
>tester for the man pages, and if I would agree to use them a predefined
>amount in the next month I could keep them free--this after they had
>my check!)

That's strange...I ordered the online manual along with rtx, vsh, hd sentry,
sds, uucp, and the mtcsh 1.2 upgd with no problems whatsoever....hmmm...

>And on a different note, I was hoping for something like 24 bit color in the TT!
>Does anyone know how many planes the ATW has?  (I requested some information on
>the ATW at SIGGRAPH this year, but haven't heard anything yet).

Speaking of graphics, does anyone have more information/address of JRI's 4096
chip thingamajig?  Just like how spectrum/quantumpaint is able to pull off
512-3375 (or even 4096?) colours from the regular ST setup, wouldn't it then
be possible to display 4096-27000 colours? (ratio!)  Just a thought...
Also, I would like to get the addresses/info. on the companies that produce
add-on graphic boards for the ST - I've heard of one called Image Systems or
something, and one company also in Europe...

>Don Allison
>don@hp-col.col.hp.com
>
>As usual, these opinions are strictly my own, and even I disavow them on
>alternate days! 

--
George Ng (Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto) | "Sure, I would like Canadian
UUCP:  uunet!mnetor!{becker,hybrid}!spocom!gng |  winters too...if it weren't
 or    utgpu!ncrcan!ziebmef!spocom!gng         |  for the weather."