cjc@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Chris Calabrese[rs]) (11/01/88)
O.K. World, I went to the opening of UNIX Expo in NYC yesterday, and here are some of my impressions: Hottest Topic: Window Warz was certainly the hottest topic of debate at the show. The big question was when OSF was going to announce what window system it would support and what it would be. Next in line after that was if anyone would pay attention once they did decide. With IBM going off with NeXT, Microsoft and HP firmly committed to Presentation Manager, and Dec behind DecWindows, who knows? The general theory is that OSF will chose DecWindows, but how can they call themselves open if their window system is called DECwindows? The company which seemed to be most committed to an "industry standard" user interface was Sun, though there was also strong support from the university players for this sort of thing. Bill Joy actually went so far as suggesting that DecWindows was a very good piece of software with which a better UI could be implemented. The "open" quote of the day goes to Andrew Palay of the CMU Andrew project (referring to all the fact that most of the toolkits around are independant of the actual Look and Feel) "pick one [Look and Feel] and we'll support it" Also hats off to Paul Asente of Dec for giving an entire presentation of his window manager/toolkit work without once plugging the UI side of DecWindows (I guess he aggreed with Bill Joy). Personally, my view is this: what the industry needs to rally behind is one single Look and Feel. This does not mean one toolkit. Of all the specifications around, OPEN LOOK is the most thought out for usability, short learning curve, power, and toolkit independance. The industry should adopt OPEN LOOK, and Sun can offer it under NeWS, AT&T can offer it under Xtlib OPEN LOOK Plus (or whatever they're calling it this week), Dec can offer it under DecWindows, CMU can offer it under Andrew, and IBM, Apple, Microsoft, and HP can keep talking about why users find their propriety window systems easier to deal with when coming from a DOS/OS|2/MAC environment. The Hottest Hardware: My two favorites were the Toshiba T5100 portable '386, and Sony's magneto/optical disk (don't tell the people at NeXT about this). There wasn't any one thing which impressed me about the Toshiba, but damn that sucker is small! As for the Sony...no, it's not based on the NeXT/Cannon engine, it's totaly Sony...it's available commercially in Japan and soon in the States...it has a 90ms avg seek time...it looks like any other SCCSI disk to the host machine...it holds 325mb/side (manual flip)...it costs $4600...it's hot!!! Hottest Software: I didn't see a _whole_ lot of really impressive applications (continual pushing of last year's window managers [except for Sun and AT&T which actually had this year's versions of OPEN LOOK running], lots of hardware, and lots of 5 year old extensions to 10 year old operating systems (wow, now you can get _full_ sVr0 with one or two 4.2 networking extensions as an option when you convert to the new XYZ operating system). What I did see that was hot was the latest version of ART by Inference Corperation. To quote the literature, ART, the Automated Reasoning Tool, is a complete and integrated tool for building expert systems. The breadth and depth of ART features, fully integrated in a coherent design for the commercial marketplace, make it the most powerful and efficient tool available... ART is the only fully data-directed, hybred expert system tool on the market, which means that expert systems built in ART: o Are expandable without sacrificing speed. o Operate asynchronously so that they can be used in real time for high throughput decision support. o Are easier less expensive to maintain. I'm not an AI person, but it did look like a nice toy. OSF: OSF big cheese Henry Crouse gave the Expo's keynote address concerning the "vision" of the OSF. As one would expect, his talk featured the usual array of information on the "open ideal", and the usual lack of any actual implementation of OSF level 0. I think the idea of an "open software" consortium is wonderful. I think the people at OSF (not the members of OSF) believe that they are doing the right thing. I think the member companies are too intrenched in propriety technology (or lack of technology) to actually go along with any of OSF's better decisions. Biggest Display: IBM's oodles of mainframes in the middle of the show was shure impressive, but were they really doing anyghing beside making _all_those_ps2's look good by doing all their number crunching? Biggest "We're compatible with", "See our display with", or "We're a VAR for" company: AT&T..._all_ the small exibitors had a death-star somewhere in their display, and many were running their applications on AT&T micros. Workstation/graphics terminal hooked up as the front end to the most big systems: Sun 3...Amdahl, Prime, Pyrimid, and even the show itself were running Sun 3's. -- Christopher J. Calabrese AT&T Bell Laboratories att!ulysses!cjc cjc@ulysses.att.com
kre@cs.mu.oz.au (Robert Elz) (11/02/88)
In article <10794@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>, cjc@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Chris Calabrese[rs]) writes: > The general theory is that OSF will chose DecWindows, but how can they > call themselves open if their window system is called DECwindows? Surely they'd rename it as OpenWindows ... Only problem is that if you use OpenWindows all the papers blow off your desktop, you get dust all over the keyboard, and your mouse escapes. kre
fr@icdi10.uucp (Fred Rump from home) (11/04/88)
In article <10794@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>, cjc@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Chris Calabrese[rs]) writes:
< O.K. World, I went to the opening of UNIX Expo in NYC
< yesterday, and here are some of my impressions:
<
<
< The Hottest Hardware:
You may have missed the other end of the show.
At a special SCO technical talk Corallary and Zenith and Compaq
and others gave the lowdown about building computers for software
that exists. Quite a change. 1200 vendors sell Xenix code.
Zenith will actually show the little square box at Comdex that they
talked about. NY was sort of an unofficial pre-announcement.
Briefely, for all you hardware mongers, a 386 multi-processor machine
that can handle up to 160 terminals.
Lots of scsi drives and mucho ram sitting on a licensed superfast
cache bus from Corallary that sits on top of the AT bus waiting for
the EISA bus.
Up to five fast 386's working in tandem. SCO will support this system
with its SCO UNIX/386 in the Spring.
< Biggest Display:
<
< IBM's oodles of mainframes in the middle of the
< show was shure impressive, but were they really doing anyghing
< beside making _all_those_ps2's look good by doing all their
< number crunching?
Yes, it was sort of the joke of the show.
< Christopher J. Calabrese
< AT&T Bell Laboratories
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