A/UX Release 2.0 (long)

[Daniel J. Oberst]

In article <1826 at sequent.cs.qmw.ac.uk> liam at cs.qmw.ac.uk (William Roberts) 
writes:

> >Your MacOS/Multifinder environment gets a chunk
> >of memory equivalent to your installed RAM. So a 4 MB Mac with A/UX
> >2.0 gets a 4MB Multifinder environment, and A/UX's memory management
> >keeps it and the MacOS side of the house happy in that space.
> 
> Beta software may change. There's no reason for this arbitrary
> limit and I for one want it raise to the size of the swap
> space. After all, A/UX itself takes a megabyte or more like all
> the other Unix kernels these days, so that "4 Meg" is using
> virtual memory anyway.
> 
For what it's worth MacLeak reported (pre-announcement of A/UX 2.0) that 
it would be able to take advantage of Virtual Memory.  Stay tuned!!  I only know what I read there.

> >All this flexibility comes at a price. Running a very early beta
> >release of the software ...
> 
> ... months from now people will be saying "well, they
> said on the net that A/UX is really sluggish" and it will be
> YOUR FAULT.
>
OK, OK.  I said it was VERY EARLY BETA.  That means there is lots of 
debugging code, non-yet-optimized,  etc.  Anyway, I would *expect* there 
to be some overhead to running all this on top of unix.  All these GUI's are 
going to take lots of desktop horsepower.  Apple with QuickDraw has a 
leg up on many of them, and throwing a fast CPU at it can help with the 
non-graphical work underneith.  Will a MacII user take a performance hit 
running Mac OS applications on A/UX 2.0? I can still use my MacPlus to run 
Excel 2.2, but at some point you'll want more power, and I suspect the 
same will be true of MacII users running A/UX 2.0. (or even 1.1)

> 4) A/UX and SunOS are the current innovators in the UNIX
> interface (MACH is the innovator in UNIX internals, but that's
> a different story)

The NeXT interface is breaking as much ground and running interference for many of the problems all of these guys will face:
   o 1 vs. 2 vs. 3 buttons
   o click-to-type vs. focus-follows-pointer
   o handling modal dialog boxes in background windows/processes
   o system set-up and administration, etc.  

Apple is 
bringing its wealth of applications right along with it (WITH its GUI). 
NeXT has to get vendors to develop applications for their GUI.  Unix 
International and OSF (SUN & AT&T vs. DEC, IBM, HP etc.) are trying to 
figure out how to make or get 3rd party vendors to make GUI applications 
(SunTools/OpenLook/Motif/NeXT Step).  And of course we all know what 
success OS/2 is having getting software lined up to run on it GUI.  The 
desktop wars may be marketing hype, but people with buy machines and they 
will buy software & operating systems for them.  Most will want 
applications and then be happy to know about the underpinnings.

--"insider information?", no siree.  Just one person's opinion.

Daniel J. Oberst