bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) (03/06/88)
First, any reactions to the Apple "AI Workstation" (that means it runs lisp) announcement this week? Maybe someone can at least summarize what the announcement was about. I was at Usenix a couple of weeks ago and stopped by Uniforum for an afternoon. I was amazed at the number of workstations or workstation-like (eg. small towers with a few boards, but no screens) systems there are now. There were dozens of respectable systems on the floor. The range seems to be from about 1MIP to 15..20MIPs (everyone heard about Apollo's announcement, sounds impressive!) I was looking at one company running X-windows on a 19" 1200x1600 monochrome screen on a 386 (using a co-processor to do the graphics.) Also very impressive and quite inexpensive (a useable system like that is probably $6K-ish.) We keep hearing rumors about Sun's 386 system. I am beginning to wonder if we're about to see a massive explosion of 386 Unix systems doing serious work, they can certainly deliver the price-performance. Unix hides the architectural details well enough that I suspect those who dislike the '86 architecture will give in on this, besides the 386 helps hide most of the earlier problems at the hardware level. Of course, new introductions at the low-end based on Sun's SPARC (from AT&T?) and Motorola's 68030 (and/or Motorola's to-be-announced RISC) could offer interesting alternatives. I still say the fate of Unix remains in the hands of the disk manufacturers and it looks like they're making good on their promises, fast 100MB winchesters are finally coming down into the less than $1K range. Conversely, I will make the bold prediction that the Mac has peaked, the novelty is wearing off and its non-standard environment and lack of things like networking (regardless of all the attempts to make it seem otherwise) will start to push people towards these standard systems. The Mac/OS will become Apple's VMS and they will start to struggle internally (just like DEC has) about what to do with Unix. I expect to see MicroSoft put most of their software products into the Unix system in the next year, with others to inevitably follow. Products like NeXT will probably make all this even more clear (if NeXT is ever released, I don't know enough about it to really predict whether it will be a success, it's not clear Steve Jobs does either...) Where does all this leave OS/2 (half an operating system)? It will enjoy some popularity no doubt, but I hardly expect anything exciting or interesting to come out of it. There will always be a market for grey-flannel computing. -Barry Shein, Boston University