bob@imspw6.UUCP (Bob Burch) (12/16/88)
From Ted Holden, HTE: ......................... From: Todd Merriman: Sales Technologies Inc., Atlanta, GA > > I felt deep disappointment upon reading Ray Duncan's article on > "Writing OS/2 Applications with I/O Privileges" in the December DDJ. > Mr. Duncan prefaces the article with warnings about the "epic amounts > of confusion, misinformation, and disinformation" concerning > comparisons between OS/2 and Unix; and then he proceeds to perpetuate > "epic amounts of confusion ... et. al.". > > For instance, I don't believe that "writing Unix applications in > anything but C .... is nearly in impossible", and I daresay neither do > the many third-party publishers of Pascal, Ada, COBOL, C, FORTRAN, and > BASIC compilers for Unix. > > etc. etc. etc. > > As far as I am concerned, Mr. Duncan destroyed all his credibility in > the first two paragraphs of his article, and I wouldn't even bother > reading the rest. > > I am used to seeing better technical writing in DDJ. > I don't know that I am. I mean, I'm starting to believe that a great many of the mag editors and columnists out there are a bunch of squirrels and d___-heads who lack the technical competance to see the big pictures as they emerge in our industry. "OS/2, Building for the Future" etc. etc. Bull shit!! I don't see any future in OS/2 at all, and the single biggest and most obvious reason is one which I have yet to see in any magazine article. It is the following: in a year or two, vertually all mid-sized machines will be running UNIX; the idea of allowing DEC, HP, Perkin Elmer, IBM etc. to each continue selling their own little proprietary OSs for minis is simply no longer acceptable to the US government as of right now, and will obviously not be acceptable to most corporations either. Managers a year or two hence will increasingly see the following situation: mid-sized machines running UNIX and 386/486 based desktop machines which cry out for a real OS and multi-tasking applications, but which way to go?!?! Do I run OS/2 on the micros and forever have to keep track of and keep track of connecting two entirely different software worlds, or do I simply let everything run UNIX, with simple uucp connections between the desktop and the mid-sized machines? I clain you don't need to be Albert Einstein to figure this one out, and that BS/2 will lose this one first time, every time. Ted Holden HTE
hardin@hpindda.HP.COM (John Hardin) (12/20/88)
> ... the idea of allowing DEC, HP, Perkin Elmer, >IBM etc. to each continue selling their own little proprietary OSs for minis >is simply no longer acceptable to the US government as of right now, and will >obviously not be acceptable to most corporations either. > >Ted Holden >---------- I'd like to reply to this, but first let me make it clear that although I work for HP, I am not representing them here and any opinions I post here are my own. Now that that's out of the way... Obviously your addition of the word "little" above shows a disdain of the other operating systems you mention. While I agree with your prediction of the role of Unix in the next few years, I can also see why there continue to be propietary OSs. One reason is the inefficiencies of Unix. I am no Unix kernel expert, so I don't pretend to know why, but I have seen that a propietary OS can support many more time-sharing users than Unix when both are run on the same hardware. Perhaps it's the granualarity of locks available or the extra disk accesses to support the multi-level directory structure. Often this extra overhead is more cost for more features, but these extra features are usually of most use to software developers, not the accounting department in a commerial environment. Hopefully, we are entering an age when the efficient use of the human is of more importance than the efficient use of the machine, but in the meantime Unix may not be the best answer for everyone. John Hardin ----------