bob@imspw6.UUCP (Bob Burch) (06/12/89)
From Ted Holden, HTE: Did anybody notice the article on page 81 of the May 22 issue of PC Week? I've been telling people that OS-2 wasn't going to make it for three years now, but I've only begun to believe it myself in the last year; the rationale is sufficient, lack of portability, lack of connectivity, bugs etc., but rationality doesn't always triumph in the face of IBM media blitzes and hype. In particular, the squirrel mags have been hyping OS-2 to the four winds and the mountain tops for three years, and the PC-WEEK article is the first thing in print that I've seen which appears to say anything different. Unless I'm reading it wrong somehow or other, it's saying that by 1993, Unix will be doing more than double the business of OS-2 like, basically, hey the game's over; Unix is going to win and OS-2 is going to lose, simple as that. Ted Holden HTE
gary@dvnspc1.Dev.Unisys.COM (Gary Barrett) (06/12/89)
In article <237@imspw6.UUCP>, bob@imspw6.UUCP (Bob Burch) writes: > > > From Ted Holden, HTE: > > Unless I'm reading it wrong somehow or other, it's > saying that by 1993, Unix will be doing more than double the business > of OS-2 like, basically, hey the game's over; Unix is going to win and > OS-2 is going to lose, simple as that. I work for a major computer manufacturer who markets UNIX boxes and PCs. From my own experience, it would appear that OS/2 is far from a dead issue. The belief seems to be here that OS/2 has a better than fighting chance to win the desktop market, but UNIX WILL take its share of the micro business. Application software is being designed such that it will be portable to either UNIX or OS/2. My own feeling is that OS/2 will hit a quick deadend if it does not address the following: 1) POSIX, and 2) RISC. Gates claims to have a POSIX-conformant OS/2 coming down the pike, I believe. But as POSIX becomes ever more comprehensive, I just wonder if we won't see a convergence of OS/2 and UNIX. The argument over which is a better operating system will become a moot point - except that OS/2 may remain a single-user OS. As for RISC, I cannot see how Gates can continue to pinpoint OS/2 to Intel 80x86 chips when even Intel has announced a RISC chip family. Gates must make OS/2 portable to RISC (and various upcoming CISC chips) or have it become a niche OS in short order. That means an OS/2 kernel written in C.
karl@ficc.uu.net (karl lehenbauer) (06/22/89)
In article <624@dvnspc1.Dev.Unisys.COM>, gary@dvnspc1.Dev.Unisys.COM (Gary Barrett) writes: > Gates claims to have a POSIX-conformant OS/2 coming down the pike, I > believe. But as POSIX becomes ever more comprehensive, I just wonder if > we won't see a convergence of OS/2 and UNIX. The argument over which is a > better operating system will become a moot point - except that OS/2 > may remain a single-user OS. They have promised POSIX conformance because they were losing on so many Federal jobs that required it. I recall reading that the POSIX-compatible version was specifically for Federal jobs. I suspect it's just an end-run to get proprietary systems sold into contracts that specified nonproprietary ones. Almost certainly they hope the users will start running OS/2-specific stuff, locking the site into OS/2. -- -- uunet!ficc!karl "Contemptuous lights flashed across the computer's -- karl@ficc.uu.net console." -- Hitchhiker's Guide