re: macivory

[Johanna Rothman <JR@SCRC-YUKON.ARPA>]

Had you reported these bugs to the beta mailing list?  Have you reported
them now to customer-reports?  I'm not aware that we have seen these
reports, and if you have reported them and not received answers, I need
to find out why.

If you have not been reporting bugs, please start.  We can't fix things if
we don't know they're broken.

    Date: Mon, 23 Jan 89 08:27:29 EST
    From: bds@mbunix.mitre.org

    We've had a macivory since beta I.  The new release fixes lots
    of the earlier bugs, and the environment is a clone of the 3650
    with genera 7.2.  There is at least one incompatability we are
    having to fight our way through right now, though.  Our system
    does a lot of color graphics, including lots of color bitbltting.
    Some functions in the graphics package have the ability to take
    :color arguments, with :red, :blue, :green, etc. provided by symbolics.
    It works fine with draw-line and draw-rectangle, eg, but it doesn't
    work with draw-string--in fact, the affects are varied, ranging from
    simply changing the string to grey tones to drawing the mirror image
    to changing the placement to the upper left corner of the window.
    The bottom line is that we are going to have to port the system
    the same way we ported it to the MacII with Allegro, ie, with rpc's.

    Another problem we had was that the Macivory would not work with
    a 19 inch color monitor (it's a Sony trinitron monitor).  Symbolics
    told me that they only support Apple video boards.  This means that
    color work is restricted to 640x480 resolution, whether on a 13 inch
    Apple monitor or some of the large screen monitors that use the
    Apple video board.

This is not true, but our approved vendor list is very short.  Please
send information about the video card you used with the Sony monitor-
its manufacturer, the number of pixels, the bits per pixel.  Then, please
tell us what "didn't work".  We've had some interesting experiences with
other vendors interfering with Nubus memory, etc.  At this point, we support
a Radius 18" greyscale monitor.  E-machines seems to have fixed their
video cards, so E-machines may be a supported vendor soon.  We are still
evaluating other color monitors.

    One other thing that's frustrating after getting used to the 3650 is
    the speed of window switching.  Sometimes it seems to take forever
    to switch, eg, from a lisp listener to zmacs.

The first time when you create a window, or each successive time?

    It should also be pointed out that the system defintiely prefers being
    in a network with lispm's.  This is simply a hardware matter, but the
    Jasmine drive is not big enough to hold the source code.  It has to
    be stored on another machine since it requires over 60MB of disk space
    (I'm not really complaining here since the source code is a big plus). 
    Also, the tape drives on the big machines are orders of magnitude faster
    than the cute little things that work with the MacII.

QIC-100 is denser, but slower.

    Having said all this, I'd like to add that the development environment
    supplied by this system is leagues ahead of anyone elses.  This includes
    the TI MicroExplorer (which still doesn't support any color) and a
    Sun running SPE (which is buggy in some very disturbing places, like
    the debugger).  I sincerely hope the Macivory makes it, although I
    think the ivory board on a Sun or some other unix machine would be
    better.  My intent here was simply to provide some feedback for those
    who are looking into switching.

Thanks for the feedback.

    Barry Smith

Please feel encouraged to use customer-reports as a way to report bugs and
deficiencies in the system.  We need your feedback if we are to improve the product.

Johanna Rothman