[15] in OS/2_Discussion
Re: What about Unix?
bjaspan@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (bjaspan@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Jan 21 13:37:36 1992
In [0014], marc@ATHENA.MIT.EDU writes:
> * It's Too Damn Slow.
Agreed. I suspect that things can be sped up considerably by tuning
config.sys, but I don't know how yet. Also realize that a lot of the
slowness is due to our harddisk, which I think has an average access
time of two weeks.
> * The shell is too much like dos (i.e., useless)
Well, it does have line editing and scrollback (the arrow keys, not ^P
and ^N), so it is as least tolerable. However, tcsh is definately on
my "to do" list (after emacs :-).
> * PM is ugly (I know, barr3y, you're working on a native-mode X
> server)
What you are now seeing is the "Workplace Shell," one interface
written on top of PM (your comment is akin to calling X ugly because
of Motif). I suspect things will look much better in b&w at 1024x768
resolution (we even have a card that can do that), and at any rate
vtwm is also on my "to do" list (right after the X server.. :-).
> * OS/2 lacks any real multi-user capability
If you really want multi-user capability, then pure OS/2 is not for
you (there are company that sell multi-user extensions for OS/2,
however, and the net price is still probably less than Unix).
The whole point of Athena, however, is to do away with dependence on
mutiuser machines. Why do you think it is so necessary?
> * OS/2 doesn't have AFS native :-)
It does, however, have an Installable File System feature that ought
to allow it to be implemented (NFS is implemented as an IFS, in fact).
This is also on my "to do" list, although I really have no idea if it
is a reasonable goal.
Of course, people preferred Unix and bashed on OS/2 before AFS
existed, so this is not a valid argument. :-)
