bob@imspw6.UUCP (Bob Burch) (09/09/88)
From Ted Holden at HTE:
Why is UNIX vs OS/2 such an easy choice? Unix is a robust
and mature multi-tasking OS which has been steadily refined by
numerous groups of exceedingly talented people for nearly 20 years
and, in the game of portable operating systems, it is the only player
in town.
What does this mean? Without a portable OS, operating
systems and major software would always take eight or ten years
to develope, but new generations of hardware chips come out every
year and a half or so. OEMs would find themselves working for
eight years to develope a product and then have a window of a
year or less in which to market it before being leap-frogged by
somebody who simply started six months later. Only the very rich
would be able to play such a game. Users would always be
purchasing hardware which was six years outmoded and they would
always be locked into one vendor's equipment. With UNIX, if you
see a new machine you like a year or two later (perhaps because
it's ten times faster or does something new and wonderful), you
simply BUY it. Two weeks later, you're rolling again.
The federal government is insisting on UNIX for all mid-
sized computers and figures to spend the bulk of 20 billion in
new equipment purchases on UNIX systems over the next two years.
Major businesses with any sense will probably follow suit. Put
yourself in the position of a system manager at such an
installation, with mid-sized machines running UNIX and
increasingly 386-based PCs on workers desks. Would you rather
have the PCs running OS/2 (assuming OS/2 ever does run) and go
through all the gyrations of connecting the two dissimilar
worlds, or simply have everything run UNIX, with simple UUCP
links? To me at least, that's a REAL easy choice.
I am seeing two visions of a future for PCs: one a very
bright vision with cheap 386 platforms such as the Mylex, UNIX V
revision 4, C++, X-Windows 11 (which, incidentally, blows OS/2's
whole graphics concept into the stone age), cheap high resolution
screens and UNIX style generic handles for them, Open Look, etc.
etc. and, two years down the road, possibly switching the PC
world to Sparc or 88000 chips. The other vision is less bright:
IBM forever, MicroSoft forever, Intel chips forever, crippled
graphics standards forever, crippled operating systems
forever..... IBM/Microsoft are at least a year and a half away
from any 386 version of OS/2 at all and likely 10 years away from
a robust and healthy version. Does anybody still want to be
using 386 chips ten years from now?