zhahai@nbires.UUCP (Zhahai Stewart) (12/31/83)
About the trend in popular OS's. First, CP/M predates the UCSD p-system as a popular microcomputer OS; in fact UCSD's portability was in some cases bootstrapped on the CP/M bios because the latter was already well established. It's not so clear to me that the UCSD p-system was ever in the same league with CP/M and MSDOS; I would call it a sub-cult, more popular than Forth but more in that league. Of course, it rode the Pascal boom of a couple of years ago. The OS's of the masses are probably the machine specific ones from or for machines by Tandy, Commodore, Apple, and Atari. However your examples are all of OS's not tied to a specific manufacturers machines, so I suspect that you mean to limit your question to these. In which case the most popular OS coming up may by Microsoft's MSX for small systems, which seems to have a lot of support in Japan for a variety of machines in the low 3 digit price range. Or perhaps CP/M-on-a-chip from DRI. Alright, lets consider more capable and interesting systems. The CP/M family with MP/M II, CP/M 86, Concurrent CP/M, etc. is not yet dead, and if the next CCP/M has MSDOS emulation and windows it will be a contender. MSDOS is planned (they tell us) to expand towards UNIX, including concurrency, etc. I think these can hold on to the bulk of the $1500 - $6000 systems for some time to come. It is questionable whether UNIX can gain a sufficient hold to be truly popular: it is really more (and less) than the mass market needs. Quite a bit of consumer needs can be satisfied with floppy disk OS's, while the path of Unix seems to be upward to larger machines and disks. Microsoft seems to be planning a three fold approach: MSX for low end, MSDOS for middle, and XENIX (a small machine Unix) for high end. They could conceivably all 3 come up winners for popularity (in their own niches). IE: Unix may not bump CP/M and MSDOS from their niches, just take over another niche (the used-to-be-a-respectable-minicomputer-but-now-its-a-micro niche served by 68000/Z8000/16000 machines with hard disks) which was not well served by CP/M and MSDOS. The only real contender I have heard of is the Pick OS. Of course, WHICH branch of the UNIX tree will come out on top is another question... Of course, by popular, you may mean "popular with the media". In which case Smalltalk and its successors may be the "after Unix" winners, partly because of the novelty and "gee whiz" aspects. Perhaps we should measure popularity not by number of installed units, dollar sales, users, or "significant software development activity", but by the number of magazines or pages of print associated with an OS (or systems which run on that OS). (Or by the space devoted to it in Byte?). If so, smalltalk is probably next.