🚀 go-pugleaf

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):
(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)

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I purchased everything that Beckemeyer put out for a while (C-shell, MT C-shell,
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).

It's been a while, but some of the things I discovered were 1)bad documentation,
especially the lousy installation instructions (after installing it and
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.),
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,
because just about the time I'd convince myself that maybe it could be a
useful development environment, I'd try something simple only to find that
that feature wasn't implemented), and worst of all, 5) the system kept
crashing when I tried to do almost ANYTHING (ESPECIALLY vsh! This was
the most frustrating thing and was the point where I gave up and cleaned the
stuff off my hard drive--I tossed Ansiterm earlier when it didn't do the 
binary file transfers it advertised it would, that were the reason I'd
purchased it...I even reinstalled it from the floppy and read and followed
the directions in the manual :-) and it didn't work!).

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

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

Don Allison
don@hp-col.col.hp.com

(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!)

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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).

Don Allison
don@hp-col.col.hp.com

As usual, these opinions are strictly my own, and even I disavow them on
alternate days!