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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.