On 05/11/2009, at 6:27 AM, Aaron Bartell wrote:
What is your *nix story? (FYI, Using an asterisk in place of the L
in Linux is a way to reference both Unix and Linux which are very
similar in nature as I understand it. I also understand that Mac
OSX is more based on Unix than Linux. )
For what it's worth:
My first Unix exposure was in 1987 on a Ctix MightyFrame running some
dialect of SystemV that I know longer remember (probably have a
reference book in a box somewhere though).
The company I worked for had two ICL System 25 mini-computers, batch
data processing, reams of reports, etc. and the Ctix system was
intended to be installed in each of the branches with batch updating
to the System 25s. I wrote various shell scripts and used awk for
reports plus a bunch of other stuff. I was young and silly and thought
Unix was pretty cool--I liked its obscurity, I liked the weird command
names, I liked the alt-left-shift-handstand incantations necessary to
make it "do stuff".
Then the company got a new MIS manager who changed direction. Dumped
the Ctix systems and the ICLs and brought in a System/38 with 5294
remote controllers and on-line real-time data entry. I think I fell in
love with the '38. I saw what a system that was DESIGNED rather than
created by accretion could be like. I realised that everything else
paled by comparison. I'm now of the opinion that Unix is blight on the
IT industry--the only good thing about it is that everything is a file
and you can pipe output from one program as input to another thus
cobbling a tool together from various existing bits and pieces is
quite easy; in some ways easier than attempting the same on OS/400
however Unix is cryptic, arcane, and obscure and I think we've moved
beyond that.
My desktops have been CP/M, DOS, DR-DOS, Windows (in many versions),
OS/2 (also in many versions), and now MacOS X. I dabbled with Linux
but even with a packaged distribution it still needed far to much care
and feeding. I play on OS/400--I want my desktop to just work. I got
that with OS/2 Warp which I used until 2003. At that time OS/2 just
became too hard to use if you needed to interoperate with other
systems--although Warp Server is still my mail server, PDC, etc. It
was difficult to find good quality software, and much of the free/
cheap OS/2 stuff simply interfered with the OS, or was awful to use. I
looked at RedHat Linux and found it unappealing. I recall checking
some other distributions out but found you still had to download a
gazillion things and rebuild to get a working system. That's just too
hard so I bought a G4 PowerBook and haven't looked back. I still use
that when I'm travelling but have an Intel iMac (8,1) for daily use.
I do still need WinDOS for some things. On the PowerBook I used
VirtualPC for the small amount of concurrent WinDOS stuff I needed
like testing in IE. It worked OK (slow but livable) until Mickeysoft
bought it and then it ran like a sick dog. I noticed that if you
installed a fresh copy of W2K plus VPC and VPC fixes it ran OK but
when you installed a particular W2K fix pack in the VM VPC ran so slow
as to be unusable.
I now use Parallels for any WinDOS stuff which mostly is for PC5250
emulation and some RDI/WDSC. I've tried some of the Mac 5250 emulators
and they just aren't up to scratch.
o Mochasoft is an incomplete implementation of the 5250 data stream
(a problem in all their variants)
o tn5250j is incomplete and buggy
o x5250 is incomplete and too Unix-y
For what I do I need a fully compliant 5250 emulator so PC5250 it is.
I also use Parallels to experiment with different OS's. I have OS/2
Warp, DOS, Win2K (English and Japanese), WinXP, and Ubuntu Linux
installed. Although Ubuntu is far better than the Linux distributions
I recall it still seems clumsy compared to MacOS X. I like what Apple
are doing, I like their design philosophy, and I'm prepared to pay
them to keep that happening. I'm not blind though--there are many
things I dislike about Apple and MacOS X (memory management being one
of them--much better now but still not as good as OS/2) but it does
what I want reliably and consistently--and it's pretty to look at.
I also have a R50e Thinkpad with WinXP primarily for QuickBooks. I'd
rather run a Mac accounting package but none of them have the ability
to import historical data from QuickBooks (and the local QuickBooks
distributor refuses to bring in and localise the Mac version of
QuickBooks). Although I could run this in a Parallels VM having it on
a separate laptop means it can easily be shared when the accounts need
to be done.
I have OpenOffice installed and it is far better than it used to be. I
also have Microsoft Office X (old now but what's in the new version I
really need?) but for most of my documentation I use Apple's iWork.
Pages is easier to use than either Writer or Word. Numbers is simply a
far better spreadsheet program than Excel. I haven't done much with
Calc but it seems similar to Excel--there's so much more you can do
with Numbers. Keynote is better than PowerPoint. I haven't even looked
at Impress so can't comment.
I'll probably just lurk here and watch what you guys are up to with
your systems. Some of it may be transferable to MacOS X.
Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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