thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan) (02/27/90)
DIGITAL REVIEW is a bi-weekly tabloid featuring news concerning DEC and related matters. The following items (a letter and its response) appear on page 24 of Monday's (February 26, 1990) edition of DIGITAL REVIEW in the Editorial/Opinion column, and are reproduced here exactly as they appeared. Of note is the assertion 1% of all Usenet sites are AMIGAs. For all DEC's rhetoric about a certain other machine, the AMIGA is the system DEC should be touting. Nomenclature: DEC - Digital Equipment Corporation DECUS - Digital Equipment Corporation Users' Society SIG - (any) Special Interest Group of DECUS VMS - DEC's OS for VAX computers (begin quoted items) `` USENET: NOT JUST UNIX I'm writing in response to Kurt Reisler's Unix Views column, "Usenet: a loosely organized, but binding network," on page 28 of the Feb. 12 issue. Not only is Usenet a global village, as the column says, but it is also decidedly not Unix-specific. DECUS distributes a UUCP implementation for both VMS and Amiga systems -- an important fact that the columnist should have found worth mentioning, as he is chairman of a DECUS SIG. Examination of my old copy of the UUCP map database (which, unfortunately, does not include all of the DECUS UUCP sites added in the last few months) shows the following breakdown of the 5,935 systems listed: Amiga, 56; VMS, 119; Unix (about 20 different kinds recognized), 4,536; other, 1,224. Assuming that about half of the "other" systems are unrecognized strains of Unix, you would get approximately the following percentages: Unix, 88 percent; VMS, 2 percent; Amiga, 1 percent, other (mostly MS-DOS PCs), 9 percent. Of course, there is the interesting question, "What percentage of sites in the Usenet network (e.g. those sites handling news) have Usenet map entries?" George Carrette Vice President of R&D Mitech Corp. Concord, Mass. Kurt Reisler responds: Usenet might not be Unix-specific, but Unix systems certainly make up the great majority of Usenet sites. It is plausible that half of the 1,224 systems you list as "other" are Unix, but it is just as plausible that the distribution of those "other" systems matches the distribution of the whole Usenet population. In that case, we arrive at a total distribution of about 96 percent Unix, 2 percent VMS, 1 percent Amiga and 1 percent other. (Based on your numbers, I did a recent count of total Usenet sites and came up with 6,896 nodes, with more than 25 different types of Unix and even a TOPS-10 system.) I am well aware of DECUS UUCP, which is the result of a lot of hard work by many talented people. Indeed, I find it unfortunate that even with this software available, only 119 of the thousands of VMS systems out there are on Usenet. A reference to DECUS UUCP was included in the original version of my column but was edited out because it was peripheral to the focus of the column -- as the name Unix Views indicates. There is no doubt that Usenet is still strongly Unix-oriented, but it has always had a spirit of "glasnost" and is truly an open, electronic global village, to which the increasing number of non-Unix nodes attests. The resources of Usenet are also available to people on other networks (such as FidoNet), thanks to gateways between the various networks. '' (end quoted items). Thad Floryan [ thad@cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]