Berkeley Utilities and other questions

[Bill Mayhew]

Wanting bugless BSD 4.3 / Sys V r 4 / Sun-os, or whatever, MS-DOS
functionality, display Postscript, etc. all in a lap-top computer
is a darn tall order.

Toshiba is probably the closest to doing it all in a laptop in one
place at one time.  Toshiba distributes a release of AT&T Sys V r3.2.?
that runs on the 386 based 3000 and 5000 series computers.  I got a
look at a Toshiba 3200 for a couple of weeks a few years ago when
it was Sys V r3.1.  It was a pretty decent system, but there wasn't
any way in heck that I could have found all the worm holes in the
short time that I had the machine.

Toshiba also has, available only in Japan, a machine that is based
on the SPARC CPU chip.  Boy would I love to have one of those.  If
Toshiba imports it to the US, the projected list price is supposed
to be around $10K (US funds).

As far as display postscript goes for previewing ditroff output on
a 386 based system goes, I am still waiting for something that
really satisfies me.  I can tell you, though, that even on systems
thave have been built from the ground up on display postscript,
namely the NeXT computer, that even that isn't WYSIWYG  between the
screen and printer -- though its pretty close.  There isn't a
portable version of the NeXT anywhere in sight yet, however.  Even
the color verision of the next NeXT is under pretty tight wraps,
though I can verify that test versions of the next NeXT exist.
Of course, the NeXT system does not run DOS either.

As far as mixing MS-DOS and Unix go, I don't like any of the
products I've seen there.  The Sun 386i wasn't too bad, but it was
slow.  DOS Megre and Simultask are both slow and have numerous
bugs and compatibility problems.  On my own 386, I decided that I'd
just fdisk between the Unix partition and a small DOS partition on
my drive.  That works really well, and since it is my personal
system, there isn't any big deal about shutting down unix to reboot
into DOS for a while to do the things that DOS is handy for.

A standard Unix?  It'll probably happen about the same time that
there is one standard automobile for everyone.  The problem is that
everyone wants something different, thus there is no room to agree
upon what is standard.


==Bill==
-- 

Bill Mayhew  Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine
Rootstown, OH  44272-9995  USA    216-325-2511
wtm at uhura.neoucom.edu   ....!uunet!aablue!neoucom!wtm