Subject: Re: CCL:Chemistry on PC:s

From: [email-masked] (Walter E. Reiher III)
Date: Fri, 3 Feb 1995 08:43:45 -0800

>One further aspect is also the fact that we can also run Windows NT
>on "real" graphics workstations today. However, I don't know about
>any computational chemistry applications ported to the graphics
>workstation/Windows NT platform. Would any of you want to change
>the Unix on your graphics workstation into Windows NT?
>
>If you have any opinions/ideas about these things, please let me know.

I've been using NT quite a bit recently.  It stands head and shoulders
above DOS/Windows:  it's much more stable and is actually usable.  Though
NT has some strong points, I wouldn't want to give up my UNIX box yet:

. NT does allow you to run commodity "general productivity" applications
like Word, Excel, etc. and buy them at a reasonable price; can't do that
with UNIX.

. However, although MOST Windows apps run under NT (NOT ALL), I have seen
very few applications which support advanced features in NT.  The one that
bugs me the most is that most apps don't support NT's long filenames (as
opposed to DUMBNAME.DOS).  Forget those handy Windows utilities programs
under NT; most of them don't work.
     Hopefully this will get better when Windows95 finally arrives, since
95 compatibility means NT compatibility.

. NT has multitasking and pipes, but they don't work the way I (as a UNIX
person) expect them to.

. From my limited experience, I don't find PC compilers to be very robust.
The particular problem I've seen is that a highly-regarded compiler
(Watcom) isn't able to produce a working MOPAC 93 executable.  For those of
us who would like to continue to use mature, portable codes like this, this
is a big barrier.
     I'm sure things are quite different for new code written in C++ or
Visual Basic.

It will be interesting to see what kind of market arises to support OpenGL
boards; unless it's also in Windows 95, I doubt it will happen soon.  NT is
still viewed as a specialist product, and doesn't enjoy wide support yet.
     From what I've read, all one can hope for with OpenGL under NT at
present is static images--it's far too slow to support interactive
graphics.

Hope these $.02 contribute to the discussion...

Wally

========================================================================
Walter E. Reiher III, Ph.D.                            [email-masked]
Consultant in Computational Chemistry
P.O. Box 61056                                        voice 408-720-0240
Sunnyvale, CA 94088                                     fax 408-720-0378