🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Oct24.021415.6592@ugle.unit.no>, arnej@lise.unit.no (Arne Henrik Juul) writes:
|> At our university we are about to get some heavy PR campaigns for
|> Apple's unix A/UX the next weeks or so. I would very much like to get
|> some questions to ask them that they won't like, embarassing facts and
|> failures in the OS, ways to easily crash the system etc.
|> 
|> Comparisons to other Unices are welcomed, too.
|> 
|> Please reply via E-mail only, and I will summarize to the group in a
|> couple of day's time.
|> 
|> Thanks in advance!
|> 
|>    Arne H. Juul, arnej@lise.unit.no



  It seems my message has stirred up quite a flamewar on
gnu.misc.discuss, it seems tempers are really hot on the issue of
apple here, both pro and against. Actually, if I may say so, some of
the discussion seems a bit silly (speculating about my motives,
whether my means are immoral, etc.)

  So to sum up some of my reasons for the question:

  The local computer pushers (sells Macs, IBM-PCs, etc) has currently
a big campaign 'introducing Unix in Norway'. (This means introducing
A/UX at the university, actually).
  They are promoting Macs with A/UX for a lot of reasons: It has the
technologically best solutions, it works well in any environment, can
communicate successfully with all types of machines, it is
standards-compliant, etc, etc. This may of course be true, but I am
always very doubtful about all such claims when I do not know the
OS in question.
  The salesmen in question would certainly like to have everybody on
the university swap their Unix machines with Macs running A/UX, as
this would mean tremendous sales and profits for their company
(There's at least 450 Unix machines here today). That's OK, too,
that's their job. But I, personally, do NOT think I would like having
only A/UX machines around.

  So I asked out for what the problems with these machines are.
Because I plain refuse to believe that they are the answer to Man's
problems.
  There's another side to this: I know a lot about some of the design
flaws and traps with the OS's I've worked a lot with. (SunOS and
Ultrix).  This means I consider myself capable of judging these
systems, their relative merits, and make suggestions as to what people
should buy, what they can expect, etc. But I won't sit around with
someone who's going to buy a machine and tell them of all the things
that works well on the machines. If it works, it isn't extremely
interesting.

  I posted first to gnu.misc.discuss, partly because I know there is
strong anti-apple feelings here. On numerous suggestions, I have also
posted to comp.os.aux. Neither gave me many answers (gnu.misc.discuss
gave the most response), but I thank those who took their time to
answer my questions without flaming.


   ...after this long and windy preamble, here's the summary at last.
I hope those quoted do not mind, I have only edited out my own
previous postings which were cited in all answers.
   Flames etc. have not been included here, nor answered.

 > Date: Thu, 24 Oct 91 13:08:47 PDT
 > From: paul@hal.com (Paul Sander)
 > To: arnej@lise.unit.no
 > Subject: Re: A/UX comments wanted
 > Organization: HaL Computer Systems
 > 
 > Arne,
 > 
 > I've been using A/UX for about 10 months now.  I like it a lot, but there
 > are some warts to be careful of.  It tries to support everything (Posix,
 > System V, and BSD), which is both a plus and a minus.  The plus is that
 > each system is implemented well;  The minus is that most folks porting
 > software like to mix implementations, which leads to trouble.
 > 
 > Complaints about A/UX include a lack of support for tape backups from Apple,
 > UUCP seems to create a lot of problems for a lot of folks (but it works well
 > for me), SL/IP is a bit hoaky, imake is distributed with X-Windows but was
 > not ported to the A/UX user environment, sendmail configuration seems to give
 > a lot of people a lot of grief, support for third party disks is limited.
 > 
 > Take a look at comp.os.aux for information.
 > 
 > Paul
 > -- 
 > Paul M. Sander  (408) 379-7000  |If all it took to fix something were a few
 > HaL Computer Systems, Inc.      |dirty words, then between the two of us, we
 > 1315 Dell Avenue                |could fix anything.
 > Campbell, CA  95008  USA        |



 > Date: Thu, 24 Oct 91 16:12:48 -0500
 > From: John Coolidge <coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu>
 > To: arnej@lise.unit.no
 > Subject: Re: A/UX comments wanted
 > 
 > You're not likely to like this answer, but it's the truth as I see it.
 > Here are the unixes I'm drawing from for comparison: AT&T SYSV (R3),
 > DG/UX, Irix, SunOS, UMAX (Encore) 4.2/4.3, HP/UX, UniCOS, and AIX.
 > A/UX is the most stable Unix of them all (except, in terms of crashes,
 > maybe UniCOS, which doesn't seem to crash but is a disaster in most
 > other respects). It interoperates very well; we've had no problems with
 > NFS (except one bug which was Sun's fault and which Apple fixed fairly
 > promptly) or YP. The development tools are not very good, but ports of
 > the GNU tools are available which make it a very good development
 > environment. The MacOS emulation environment is very good; for those who
 > don't like the MacOS, X11R5 runs very adequately.
 > 
 > Overall, A/UX is the most trouble-free Unix we've got, except perhaps
 > SunOS -- which has the advantage of zillions of machines out there
 > running it. For a smaller-vendor Unix, A/UX is way ahead of the pack. 
 > The biggest problem is that you have to have Apple hardware to run it,
 > and they're not all that great price-performance (even with the new
 > Quadras).
 > 
 > --John


 > Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1991 17:07:49 -0400
 > From: wolfgang@wsrcc.com (Wolfgang S. Rupprecht)
 > To: arnej@lise.unit.no (Arne Henrik Juul)
 > Subject: Re: A/UX comments wanted
 > Organization: Wolfgang S. Rupprecht Computer Consulting, Washington DC
 > 
 > Apple hasn't been keep up too well with state of the art.  Their Unix
 > last time I looked was based on AT&T System Vanilla, the lowest common
 > denominator in Unix Systems.  Any serious research establishment will 
 > want to run BSD (or some derivative like Dec Ultrix or Sun's SunOS).
 > 
 > Last I heard Apples Aux was still some flavor or sysV.2.  This means
 > that they are at least 5 years behind the times even for System V
 > vendors.
 > 
 > Apples Mac-II platforms are pretty slow.  They often add quite a few
 > wait states to the CPU to DRAM data path.  This ends up making a very
 > slow platform.  Compare the drystones (or any other cpu intensive)
 > benchmarks.  Apples are always the slowest of the bunch.
 > 
 > Apples have awful disk throughput.  System 5 at best gets ~50k to 70k
 > bytes per second.  Contrast this to any BSD machine (DEC, Sun, etc)
 > which routinely get ~600K bytes/sec writing and ~300K bytes/sec
 > reading.
 > 
 > Network throughput on System V's is pretty slow too.  Raw ftps on a
 > Sun or Dec Vax are also 300-600 kbytes per second.  I have only seen
 > System V boxes that were around 70kbytes.
 > 
 > In my opinion the biggest bang per dollar is a Sun ELC.  University
 > prices should be around 60% of list price or $3200.  Perhaps a Sun rep
 > can send you a comparison chart of Apples to Suns giving some hard
 > numbers.  
 > 
 > Many good software tools don't run on Apple AUX for various 
 > reasons. ;-) Since the value of a good software base if often much more
 > important than the hardware itself, one has to ask what the utility of
 > an inherently slow machine with virtually no user-written software is.
 > 
 > Macs are much more expensive and much slower.  I don't really know how
 > Apple is able to sell such slow junk at such high a price.
 > 
 > -wolfgang
 > -- 
 > Wolfgang Rupprecht    wolfgang@wsrcc.com (or) uunet!wsrcc!wolfgang
 > Snail Mail Address:   Box 6524, Alexandria, VA 22306-0524


 > Date: Fri, 25 Oct 91 22:58:43 +0100
 > From: d88-jwa@nada.kth.se
 > To: arnej@lise.unit.no (Arne Henrik Juul)
 > Subject: What flaws in A/UX?
 > 
 > A/UX is fully SVID compliant for SVR_2_. It also has just about full
 > BSD 4._3_ support (it has all of 4.2 which is what people use anyway)
 > 
 > The C compiler is a pcc lookalike, i.e. no ANSI C. There is a good,
 > modern ansi C compiler and C++ on it's way in the A/UX developers
 > tools package (which I have beta tested - they worked nicely)
 > 
 > Mac OS handling is good most of the time. SCSI doesn't work the same,
 > so no luck using retrospect or something like that. Tape drives need
 > special drivers, which may be hard to come by.
 > 
 > Running A/UX with the 6.0 finder AND MacX at the same time is nice.
 > X is a little slow, but that's OK. Native X is quite OK.


 > Date: Fri, 25 Oct 91 16:38:18 -0500
 > From: evbrown@digi.lonestar.org (Evan Brown)
 > To: arnej@lise.unit.no
 > Subject: Re: A/UX comments wanted
 > Organization: DSC Communications, Plano Tx.
 > 
 > The Dallas / Fort Worth UNIX Users Group has been trying to get Apple
 > to give a demonstration on A/UX for several years.  Apple has canceled
 > at the last minute on all three scheduled presentations over the past
 > three years.
 > 
 > I don't think Apple wants experienced UNIX hacks playing with A/UX and
 > the bad PR that will follow.   They won't say whether its BSD or SYS5
 > and my thoughts are that its what Apple thinks UNIX should be.
 > (ie. "UNIX according to Garp" based on the quote from the Robin Williams
 > movie "Life According to Garp")
 > -- 
 > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 > Evan Brown                 UUCP:          uunet!digi!evbrown  
 > DSC Communications Corp.   OR  Internet:  evbrown@digi.lonestar.org
 > 1000 Coit Rd.,M/S 150      OR  at home:   evan@dfwuug.lonestar.org
 > Plano, TX 75023            OR  at Austin: brown@cactug.org
 > (214) 519-3577             OR  at home:   (214) 618-3525
 > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

(We have had some of these last minute cancels ourselves... hmm...)

 > Date: Sun, 27 Oct 91 11:55:38 -0800
 > From: John Kullmann <jk@apple.com>
 > To: arnej@lise.unit.no
 > Subject: A/UX
 > Cc: mgchow@apple.com, peters@apple.com
 > 
 > There are no embarrasing facts.  A/UX is the best UNIX out there. There
 > are no easy ways to crash the OS (unlike Sun for example, where <F1><A>
 > on the keyboard pops any user including unprivileged ones into some kind
 > of system debugger...).
 > 
 > Why is it that you want to shoot down A/UX?
 > 
 > -jk

(I can't resist making a comment at this one: I have heard it from
DEC, from HP, from Apollo, from IBM, from SGI, from Sun. They all say
the same: OUR unix is the best there is. I don't believe any of them.)

The missing thing about the presentation was the usual fancy colourful
diagrams showing how the Vendor's machine is at least twice as fast as
any other vendor's, or at least has a price/performance twice as good
as any other vendor.

If I get any first-hand experience with A/UX, I may share my
experiences with you all. :-)

-----------

Arne H. Juul, arnej@lise.unit.no  -  Student at Univ. of Trondheim, Norway

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