From: zeke@fasttech.com (Bohdan Tashchuk)
Subject: Re: What's happening to ISC UNIX?
Organization: Fast Technology
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 13:13:45 GMT

This is a combined response to comments made by various posters on this topic.
Various "homeys" jumped in to defend ISC, but they neglected to mention some
very important facts, many of which have been posted to this very newsgroup in
the past.

ISC Unix was a good purchase about 3 or so years ago, when I bought it. It's
NOT a smart purchase today.  There were few svr4s then. There are many now.
The net.reactionaries can claim that svr3 is "faster", but, face it, it's
obsolete.

This product is a DEAD END. Sun sells it only because they haven't shipped
Solaris. I wouldn't be surprised if Sun or its distributors jump in and deny
this, but that's because they need something to sell you in the meantime.

DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS PRODUCT, unless you need something that it
uniquely offers.

Since I'm sure to be flamed for expressing such strong opinions, I'll now go
ahead and outline many specific observations pro and con about the product.
You can use these to make up your own mind.

Factory support in this newsgroup is minimal to nonexistent, as far as I can
tell. I see postings from people at Dell, Esix, Microport, but not Sun. I know
there is an ftp.dell.com. Where is ftp.isc.com? Maybe it exists, but I've never
seen it mentioned. I've seen lots of SCO SLS announcements here. Where are the
corresponding postings about ISC bugs? SCO has a bulletin board you can call to
get the latest bugfixes. The way I was able to get the latest ISC bugfix was
for some kind soul to upload it to uunet and post a message here.

There are a number of users and distributors that regularly post replies and
announcements here, and I'm grateful for that, but that's no real substitute
for factory support.

Ksh just became available in 3.0.1. But the "homeys" forgot to mention the
following little item I saw when I used 'strings':

	@(#)Version 06/03/86a

What did Sun do to come up with this ksh? Go to a flea market in the parking
lot of some USL facility and buy a tape with 6-year-old source on it? I guess
it saved them from having to license a more recent version. I've seen
incompatibilites between sh and ksh, but I don't know if more recent versions
of ksh would have fixed them.

Lack of ksh job control isn't an issue to me, given that virtual terminals
work quite nicely.

Various people have claimed that VPIX might be updated to support Win31, but
the Locus people have been saying that VPIX won't, and only DOS Merge will.
So, someone isn't being completely honest here.

CD ROM works. I have read ISO 9660 disks using my Adaptec 1542a controller and
my AppleCD SC drive. The only disks I've tried are the Prime Time Freeware
series.

The absolute biggest problem I have is the lack of a BSD type file system.
Yes, the ffs works, but it is a JOKE if you try to run news on it. I'm set up
for a 175 MB news partition. That's about as big as I can go, because I run
out of inodes. Because of this I have to expire news much more aggressively
than I'd like to. Yes, there are patches to C News that provide support for
multiple filesystems, but these mean a lot of wasted space, since crossposted
articles must be duplicated. Also, It would be nice to have > 14 char filenames.

There is no support for ISA systems with more than 16 MB of memory. Face it, 16
MB is only $500, so it's absurd that the system can't support more. This can't
be a very difficult thing to add. Other vendors have it. The absence of it in
ISC means that Sun isn't willing to commit even minimal resources to this
product.

They say there are online man pages, but that's a lie. Try typing 'man telnet'.
You will quickly find that the supplied man pages only cover the base OS and
the programmers manuals. Not stuff like tcpip or nfs.

I like the menu based configuration. It a great convenience to me, since I'm
not an experienced administrator.

I can go to Dell and spend $1000 to $1300 and get a nice OS. Sun wants MUCH
more for less functionality. Perhaps you can believe the "homeys" when they
tell you that ISC is more stable, but a number of people have posted that svr4
is quite stable for them.

Sun wants $500 for 'major' updates. Given that complete other OSs are so cheap,
with much more reasonable update fees, I can guarantee I'll never buy another
'major' update from Sun. Even the $95 'minor' update I just got (primarily for
the ksh) was a joke, given how old the ksh was.
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386