CHAOS MANOR

indeed, that box was larger than the ones
the machine itself came in. When we got
it open, we found it was more documents
than software. Volume after volume of
documents, mostly about UNIX. For-
midable.

There was, however, a thin thing no
more than half a dozen pages long that
called itself a Quick Reference Guide. 1
thought that would surely do the trick.
Alas, no. It merely tells you, “To turn
your computer on, press the switch,
located on the back of the computer just
above the power cord, to the ON posi-
tion.” Nothing else. With grammar like
that, why should I expect information?
There was another little packet, but that
consisted of pages that I could, if I really
wanted to, insert in the spiral-bound Quick
Reference Guide, after which I'd have a
summary of DOS commands. Since my
problem was that T couldn’t get to DOS,
that didn’t seem a useful thing to do.

Next thing to do was fish around in the
software box. Sure enough, there was a
boxed book called Getting Started With
Your AT&T Personal Computer 6300 Plus.
As is customary nowadays, the pages of
the loose-leaf book were shrink-packaged
separately from the tab cards; it takes.a
good five minutes to render the thing
usable. Eventually I got it together, only
to discover that it wasn’t much help.

There was a DOS disk in the package
with the book. I put it in the floppy disk
drive and reset the machine. The 6300
trundled for a while—it makes all kinds
of tests for you—but eventually it came up
with the A> prompt. So far so good.
Now to see what’s on the hard disk. ..

I can’t find the hard disk. The system
won't believe there is a C drive. Not only
that, but it thinks B is the same floppy disk
drive as A. I suppose there’s a reason for
that, but I guess I just don’t care what it is.

Examining the Gerting Started book
reveals there’s a great deal of discussion
on partitioning the hard disk. I suppose
that’s what I’d have to do. That’s a pro-
cedure guaranteed to scare the liver out
of any casual business user, but I expect
I could manage it—except that I'm afraid
to try. After reading the legalese paper
they sent with the machine, I'm afraid to
do much of anything with it.

UNIX

When I saw the PC 6300 Plus in Atlanta,
the product manager cautioned me: “This
is a DOS machine that happens to know
UNIX, but please, please, don’t stress
UNIX. Stress that this is an AT that runs
PC and AT programs.”

Still, it’s obvious that the machine
comes up in UNIX when you boot from
the hard disk. It does all the UNIX-like
tests and demands that you log on. Since

I don’t know how to log on, I had to wait
for my son Alex who is a UNIX wizard.
He managed to log on, I think as
“root.”’

Meanwhile, I tried to follow what he
was doing by reading the “Getting Started
with the UNIX System” section of the
Getting Started manual. That’s a remark-
able document. It shows you a picture of
how to turn the machine on and how to
insert a floppy disk—this in a section on
getting started with UNIX. Foo. Anyone
who doesn’t know a lot more about com-
puters than how to insert a floppy disk isn’t

going to get anywhere with UNIX. I
rather soon gave up on the Getting Started
document.

Meanwhile, Alex did get UNIX run-
ning, and he discovered that this particular
AT&T 6300 Plus has about 500K bytes of
unused space on its hard disk.

Somehow I don’t think I much want a
machine that has no more than 500K bytes
for me to use. I suppose I could go down-
stairs and get the little 500K-byte bubble
memory board out of our IBM PC (the PC
thinks that’s a remarkably fast fixed disk

continued

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Inquiry 380 JANUARY 1987 » BYTE

355