dave@andromeda.rutgers.edu.rutgers.edu (Dave Bloom) (09/20/88)
Though I've been a great fan of Pyramid's OSx, I'm glad to see the whole unification effort going on at AT&T/Sun. I've just attended the System V Rel 4 Developer's Conference and it looks like the usefulness of the dual universe concept is finally coming to an end. What are Pyramid's plans, now that SystemV and BSD will be under the same umbrella? I assume they'll support Rel 4... when do they plan on being able to ship? The representatives from AT&T/Sun intimated that there will in all likelyhood be a number of vendors SHIPPING Rel 4 within WEEKS of AT&T's Release in 3Q89.... Will OSxV.4 be one of them???? Enquiring minds want to know... _______________________________________________________________________________ rutgers\ | Dave Bloom galaxy >!andromeda!dave -or- dave@andromeda.rutgers.edu | Work: (201)648-5085 pyramid/ |
csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) (09/21/88)
[Mandatory disclaimer: What follows are my very own personal opionions. I have neither the authority nor the knowledge to represent Pyramid Technology Corpo- ration on any of the following issues. My comments are *not* based on inside knowledge of anything going on at Pyramid; just my own observations based on 12 years of experience in the computer industry, and five years with UNIX.] In article <856@galaxy> dave@andromeda (Dave Bloom) writes: >Though I've been a great fan of Pyramid's OSx, I'm glad to see the whole >unification effort going on at AT&T/Sun.... it looks like the usefulness >of the dual universe concept is finally coming to an end. That would be nice if it were true; OSx is a pain in the wazoo. But it's not going away, for a lot of reasons. - Sun != BSD. Good things continue to happen at Berkeley -- better than what is coming out of Sun of late. As long as Berkeley continues to develop good things, customers will ask for them, and we (the developers) will want them too. - SVR4 is like one of those patchwork monsters in the old Japanese movies. A piece here, a piece there, all glued together. It's big, crufty, unmaintain- able, and slow. File System Switch *and* V-nodes? Wollongong TCP/IP? Gag me with an Ethernet transceiver! Note too that AT&T is only taking the very best of SunOS, those things that make the biggest splash. Lots of smaller things they are doing themselves, and *not* doing them in ways that are compatible. Guy Harris's streams TTY driver is a beautiful bit of work, but AT&T rolled their own, and I hate to think what it looks like. - Merging is still a long way off. SVR4 and SunOS 4.0 are evolutionary, just another step in a long process. Note that SunOS has lots of dualport-like hooks, ways to give the user the choice between System V semantics (so they can come closer to passing SVID) and BSD semantics (which is what all their customers are used to). As long as Sun has to have a dualport mechanism, so certainly will Pyramid. - SVR4 still smells like System V. I don't like System V. Neither does the vast overwhelming majority of Pyramid's customer base. They buy because of the att universe. They live in the bsd universe. - I am increasingly coming to agree with the "Hamilton Group" assertions. AT&T and Sun will exchange the first and the best of everything with each other, and the rest of us will get the crumbs. - A lot of us have been predicting Sun would reach critical mass and explode "soon." Meaning: crash and burn, in the glorious style of Apple, Tandon, and AMD before them. All the people who have stayed with Sun because of their "golden handcuffs" take off, and the wonderful pool of talent that Sun built up (and that AT&T is currently bleeding dry, just like they did to the good people at Convergent) will take off for greener pastures. This was averted this year because of the infusion of cash from AT&T. But that's just delay- ing the enevitable. Either that, or Sun becomes a subsidiary of AT&T, which would make all the good people leave, too. As I've groused before, I think the whole Sun/AT&T deal is a hideous waste of time and programmer resources, and OFS doubly so. I just don't see any evi- dence that either new or future customers are demanding a merged UNIX, while there are lots of other things that *must* happen for UNIX to be a commercial success. It's not yet, you know. We in our little corner of the computing world are terribly naive when we assume UNIX has the world by the tail. (It was fun discussing this with people at the PUG conference. A lot of you agreed with me, and a lot did not. Nothing happened that changed my opinion. The claim that I am blinded because Pyramid "has a solution" in OSx is not true; OSx is *not* a "solution" to the UNIX incompatability issue. It is a stopgap measure, and a very effective one. But it is not a solution.) >The representatives from AT&T/Sun intimated that there will in all likelyhood >be a number of vendors SHIPPING Rel 4 within WEEKS of AT&T's Release in 3Q89. >Will OSxV.4 be one of them???? That one is easy, even if I wasn't working here. Of course not. Pyramid has a tremendous investment in its installed base, and in all the support products, like communications. Switching operating sytems cannot be done trivially. Odds and ends -- useful ones -- from SVR4 will gradually be folded into OSx, but we sure aren't going to abandon the entire product line next year. There are lots of much more important things to do, and programmer resources are finite. I honestly have no idea what Pyramid is planning with regard to SVR4. Sure, the company is looking in to it. But for myself, if Pyramid were to persue it seriously as a replacement for OSx, I'd make every effort to persuade people that this was a bad idea. As far as vendors shipping SVR4, it will likely be similar to the majority of vendors who've signed up for SPARC: startups, or companies with a history of failure in the computer industry who are looking for an easy way to buy back into the game. Oh, and probably chip manufacturers, too; I would expect Intel and Motorola to have SVR4 ports as soon as they could. <csg>
dennisg@pwcs.StPaul.GOV (Dennis Grittner) (09/23/88)
In article <40416@pyramid.pyramid.com> csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) writes: >[Mandatory disclaimer: What follows are my very own personal opionions. I have >neither the authority nor the knowledge to represent Pyramid Technology Corpo- >ration on any of the following issues. My comments are *not* based on inside >knowledge of anything going on at Pyramid; just my own observations based on >12 years of experience in the computer industry, and five years with UNIX.] Thanks Carl, I appreciate your comments - even if ( and especially if ) they are YOUR comments. AS the current President of PUG ( realize that I speak for myself NOT for PUG ) I have some feelings and insight into the whole patchwork Unix matter... First, IBM, Dec, HP, etc aren't throwing money at Unix because they think it is unimportant - quite the opposite. Basing an OSF Unix on AIX would ( will ) be yapog ( Yet Another Piece of Garbage ) for all the computer world to use. HOpefully OSF and ATT/SUn and whoever else can work something out and create a belnd of good ideas AND good performance that will help all of us in a heterogenous Unix environment. Pyramid OSx has been good because they have addressed a lot of performance and other problems in Unix relatively well. I think that Pyramids recent concentration on being a network database/compute server is every good as this fits the whole world of distributed ( front-end /back-end ) processing. I agree Carl, when would anybody expect anything good from AT&T - or for that matter from IBM and Dec?? " Save us all - here come our saviors"! -- Dennis Grittner City of Saint Paul, Minnesota (612) 298-4402 Room 700, 25 W. 4th St. 55102 "Let's just put Ollie, Ronnie, and George in jail!"
dave@andromeda.rutgers.edu.rutgers.edu (Dave Bloom) (09/23/88)
In article <40416@pyramid.pyramid.com> Carl S. Gutekunst writes: > > > SVR4 is like one of those patchwork monsters in the old Japanese movies. A > piece here, a piece there, all glued together. It's big, crufty, unmaintain- > able, and slow. File System Switch *and* V-nodes? Wollongong TCP/IP? Gag me > with an Ethernet transceiver! Note too that AT&T is only taking the very > best of SunOS, those things that make the biggest splash. Lots of smaller > things they are doing themselves, and *not* doing them in ways that are > compatible. Guy Harris's streams TTY driver is a beautiful bit of work, but > AT&T rolled their own, and I hate to think what it looks like. I agree, V4 is big... yet what would you expect? To combine the functionality of a number of variants you're going to have alot of redundancy, yet I like the way AT&T's going about it. (Even though that's not the 'chic' thing to say nowadays) The compatability libraries for 4.3BSD will allow a user to get up and running fast with a majority of his software intact. The V-node idea, while not optimal, preserves EVERYONE'S investment whether it's in NFS, RFS, SysV or Berkeley 'fast'. It was my understanding that AT&T was DROPPING Wollongong and Sun was doing the TCP/IP implementation. > Merging is still a long way off. SVR4 and SunOS 4.0 are evolutionary, just > another step in a long process. Note that SunOS has lots of dualport-like > hooks, ways to give the user the choice between System V semantics (so they > can come closer to passing SVID) and BSD semantics (which is what all their > customers are used to). As long as Sun has to have a dualport mechanism, so > certainly will Pyramid. Those 'hooks' will exist in V4 except perhaps in the opposite direction... and since SystemV is adopting things like reliable signals and the unified file system, it will look more like SunOS to begin with. I think you'll see Sun embracing V4 as their own. > SVR4 still smells like System V. I don't like System V. Neither does the > vast overwhelming majority of Pyramid's customer base. They buy because of > the att universe. They live in the bsd universe. This means absolutely nothing to me... it's something I expect to hear from our students, not from you Carl. With much of the Berkeley 'look&feel' preserved, and such niceties as job control and C-shell standard, I imagine a majority of those BSD bigots will be as happy as a pig in... mud. What V4 will accomplish, as I see it, is what OSx did, without having to choose between att and ucb universes, and it paves the way for a true unified standard which we can all rally around. > I am increasingly coming to agree with the "Hamilton Group" assertions. AT&T > and Sun will exchange the first and the best of everything with each other, > and the rest of us will get the crumbs. I hope Pyramid agressively pursues the SystemVRel4 standard... without a doubt, with the talent that they've already showed with OSx they could do a wonderful job, crumbs or not. _______________________________________________________________________________ rutgers\ | Dave Bloom galaxy >!andromeda!dave -or- dave@andromeda.rutgers.edu | Work: (201)648-5085 pyramid/ |