Re: Unix and XyWrite and whatnot

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to note from xywrite@xxxxxxxx Thu, 03 Dec 1998 20:54:31 -0600

Very interesting post, Harmon. Tell me a bit more. Can you run Virtual PC
processes in full screen text mode? Does the Mac even _have_ something like a
full-screen black-and-white text mode? Can you run Linux as a child process? What
about COMM stuff and the quality of TCP/IP? And suppose you don't run ANY graphix
programs -- no PageMaker or Photoshop or DTP -- are there still advantages?
What about file management, grep, that sort of thing: is there a command line?
Are there command line utilities? When you say it runs "most" W9x/NT/OS2, could
you amplify on the "most" part? What doesn't run?

And speaking of OS/2, does Apple have a future? If the OS/2 analogy holds,
excellence doesn't necessarily mean dominance or, as you would have it, a future.
(I was first told in 1992 that OS/2 had "no future", and it still meets all my
needs, as it does for many others. Some of us positively enjoy using products with
no future, like XyWrite -- I mean, I've always conceded that from the perspective
of offices or idiots churning out memos over intranets, XyWrite was inappropriate
-- but what do I care? Whereas, if your standard is the "excellent" StarOffice
leviathan, which I've installed, also free, under OS/2, then we have radically
different ideas of quality.)

But if a Mac could really run all those OSes *concurrently* -- run them exactly as
they run natively, communicating with devices and etc etc -- well I'd buy one in a
flash just as a server. I guess the bottom line is, are you overstating the case
for the Mac's ability to run apps that belong to other OSes?

On my machine, Red Hat 4.0 was simply not as stable as OS/2. But I don't doubt for
a moment that the Linux folks are polishing daily, and I suspect that Linux lies in
my future. Is Red Hat 5.2 a significant improvement?

TIA. Nice to hear from you again!
 


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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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