Re: JOBS

[DARYL GIBSON]

M.K.,

Unix advocates are always claiming that Unix is the operating system of
tomorrow. Although it's gaining ground, I can't help but wonder if it's ALWAYS
going to be a "couple of years" until the grand revolution.

The real beauty of Unix (and the thing that scares hardware vendors) is that
Unix is essentially transportable across any hardware platform. A program is
amazingly transportable in the source code format. We have a Unix source code
license, and I've ported massive Unix utilities from one machine to another,
with just a few days work. Most recompile immediately, and cleanly.

That's interesting about the Post. We've been using XyWrite for nigh onto five
years here (perhaps it's longer than that) and putting out a newspaper every
day with it. It would be nice to be able to hook into the source somehow, but
since it's written in assembler, and I'm no assembler giant, I'll just stick
with what I have. What I did was take the XyWrite base, add on a text sizing
utility (written in C), teach it how to write headlines, and package it all
together on a network, talking to several Unix file servers, and from there to
Unix pagination terminals. It works, although I've been getting sort of itchy
lately to re-do the whole schmeer. Not enough to do, I guess. Good talking to
you. Daryl