Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site topaz.RUTGERS.EDU Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!columbia!topaz!lear From: lear@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (eliot lear) Newsgroups: net.micro Subject: Re: My interesting Experiences with the 3B2 (to say the best!) Message-ID: <3188@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> Date: Thu, 8-Aug-85 15:29:48 EDT Article-I.D.: topaz.3188 Posted: Thu Aug 8 15:29:48 1985 Date-Received: Sun, 11-Aug-85 05:39:34 EDT References: <453@brl-tgr.ARPA> <271@kitty.UUCP> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 61 Summary: programming vs applications In article <271@kitty.UUCP>, larry@kitty.UUCP (Larry Lippman) writes: > Oh, it's not that bad... ... > Reliability-wise, the system is on 24 hours a day and has never failed. >The cause for our now having motherboard #3 and harddisk #3 is solely ineptness > (mostly due to lack of training) on the part of AT&T. ... ... Once they got to us, they seemed to be ok. Like I said previously, getting them to us was the biggest problem. > > 1. It really has been reliable from a hardware standpoint. > That depends on your definition of reliability. Compared to what I have seen DEC systems, the 3B2 is REALLY reliable. Compared to anything else... > 2. It is extremely price competitive and is compact in size. The XM > units now allow significant disk expansion and provide a convenient > tar. > I can't argue here. > 3. In all of our application programs, the machine is fast. I mean > *really* fast, despite the lack of floating point hardware (although > we have written code to compensate for this). I have run (and have had > run for me) extensive benchmark tests comparing the 3B2 to other UNIX > systems and it compares quite favorably (except for floating point - > which is terrible) with other 32-bit machines. We have 30K+ lines of > Fortran (much of which ported from DEC and Intel Fortran) and 10K+ > lines of C running virtually bug-free. Sure, that did not happen > overnight, and sure, we made a lot of mistakes and learned things the > hard way, but it was a worthwhile experience. We are trying to write > as much new application code as possible in C, and while there are > many things yet to learn, we feel that we are in the right direction. > and the first thing you will probably learn is that the "make" facility takes for ever compared to other systems I have worked on such as Suns and Pyramids. About the only system that comes close to price and comparison is the Lisa. Let me tell you that I cannot agree with you more about the improvement over Unisoft (as far as speed is concerned). However, the problem with AT&T is that they are not in a position to use Berkeley enhancements like the Unisoft System V. > 4. The system administration functions are rather well done using menus, > which should vastly simplify things for people just learning UNIX. > I personally don't use the menu SA functions much, but that is because > I already learned the SA stuff and feel more comfortable manually > editing files. Have you tried setting up uucp with SA? We have. After trying SA, we prefer editting files too! Anyhow, I guess I shouldn't condemn the 3B2 100%. I have been 4.2ized to a degree and miss csh. One thing I am looking forward to is ksh. We have ported Gosling Emacs to the 3B2 with some success. The problems, once again are hardware oriented.