Doing simple things with AIX PS/2

[Arthur Sherman]

I am in a small group of mathematicians who are trying to upgrade
from DOS to unix by putting AIX (v 1.1) on PS/2's (Model 80's and 70's).
We have an IBM Token Ring local network on which coexist AIX machines
using TCP/IP and DOS machines using IBM PC-LAN.

We have no full-time system help; we are end-users who want to
use these machines for scientific computing and visualization.  
IBM has not been much help, so we are appealing to the community.

Problem:  We can't seem to do some very basic things that even our dumb
DOS machines can do.

1) Terminal emulation: When we telnet or rlogin as a vt100 to a non-AIX
machine (eg SUN or VMS VAX) vi doesn't work properly.  For example, when
you type ^U the top line changes but not the rest of the screen; when you
delete a line, it is not deleted from the screen; etc.  Terminal emulation
to AIX machines is ok.

2) Scientific word processing: AIX comes with troff, but drivers
only for IBM Graphics Printers.  We have an HP Laserjet and Epson LQ-800's.
We also want to do LaTeX.  I can do troff (using Textware) or 
plain TeX (using PCTeX) under DOS Merge, but this seems crazy, and 
anyway LaTeX kills the DOS process instantly.

3) Why not use SCO Xenix?  We tried this a couple of years ago,
and had lots of problems.  There was no support for Token Ring, there
were hardware incompatibilities, and VP/IX never materialized.  They seem
more oriented to the "industry standard" machines like Compaq, etc.
Some of our people will stick with DOS and we hope that IBM will have
better arrangements for this.  We plan to try AIX Access for DOS Users
so that they can use the AIX machines as print servers and the PC-LAN
software can be junked. Does anyone have experience with this?

We hope AIX becomes very popular so that lots of 3rd party software
gets written for it, but unless these kinds of problems are fixed
it will die an early death.

Beset in Bethesda,
Arthur Sherman
sherman at ncifcrf.gov
(301) 496-4325