'386 Unix Wars

[Rahul Dhesi]

I used Microport System V/AT for a year or so, and from a hacker's
point of view, it was a great inexpensive system.  Currently I'm
running ESIX Revision D and again, from a hacker's point of view it's a
great relatively inexpensive system.

For business purposes, however, based on the experience with these two
systems, I don't recommend getting UNIX from either Microport or Everex
(ESIX).  Microport had fair documentation but terrible quality
control.  Everex has a fair implementation (except for one or two
things that don't work at all) but the worst documentation I have seen
for an operating system (based on the two manuals included with what I
bought -- you can buy more manuals, which I suspect will be of the same
miserable quality).

For business purposes I recommend SCO.  Although I personally haven't
used SCO Xenix, I did use Microsoft's Xenix on a number of different
machines in the past, and it was more stable than System V/AT or ESIX.
I also uses AT&T's System V (a. UNIX PC, sort of System V Release 2
with Release 1 utilities; b. System V Release 3 on an AT&T 3B2).
Although it was stable and relatively free of bugs, the quality of
documentation was standard AT&T, which means no indexes, poor
organization, and nonexistent information about system administration
procedures.  The Xenix documentation was little better.

For good documentation and powerful features, you have no choice but to
try to find a BSD derivative (anything except Ultrix).  Right now I use
SunOS at work and find it to be relatively stable and moderately well
documented.  AT&T's SVR3 seemed to be to a little better debugged than
SunOS, but it also did far less and the documentation was pretty bad.
Unfortunately nobody sells BSD for 386-based machines.  Sun used to
sell SunOS for its own proprietary 386-based machine, but phased it
out.  Maybe you could get a used machine with the software.

Also available, still in beta-test (though they call it a "production
release") is System V Release 4.  I would wait another year, but by
then it may be the best choice available.  It has about 80% of the good
features of BSD plus most of System V Release 3.

So, although the picture looks pretty bleak right now for UNIX on the
386, things should improve when SVR4 stabilizes (and, I hope, becomes
cheaper).
--
Rahul Dhesi <dhesi%cirrusl at oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com>
UUCP:  oliveb!cirrusl!dhesi