Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ncar!asuvax!mcdphx!mcdchg!ddsw1!ddsw1!point!wek
From: wek@point.UUCP (Bill Kuykendall)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: IBM's plan for OS/2 and you
Message-ID: <[2659.1]comp.ibmpc;1@point.UUCP>
Date: 25 Oct 89 17:00:10 GMT
References: <1305@orbit.UUCP>
Lines: 87

>>Just think, to get a UN*X platform with a nice windowed interface (X11) 
>>running at any reasonable performance level, 8 Megabytes is the 
>>suggested minimum (as someone who has run X11R3 on a system with 8 MB, 
>>I feel even this may be somewhat light)...and think what you'd pay for

Just out of curiosity, is that an official recommendation from one of the
suppliers of unix?  I've been told that 4mb is touch and go (probably more
touch than go) but I haven't seen an official recommendation.

>     Seems to me that both systems, OS/2 and Unix are about the same in size

,
>(boht in hard disk space, memory required), and boht offer about the same
>amount of functionality with the exception that Unix supports terminals.

You're half right.  They require similar resources.  But...

Unix has been evolving for 20 years and it still has a few minor bugs -- as
any system with that volume of code is bound to have.  OS/2 hasn't been
booted enough times to even find the bugs.

Unix is a rich programming environment right out of the box.  All of the
shells available have extensive batch languages that make compilers
all but unnecessary unless you need the efficiency of a binary program
or have to do windowed screen io, or (ok, maybe I'm exagerating a *little*). 
Unix also has awk, lex, and yacc language extensions to handle just about any
kind of string manipulation you can imagine.  There are also dozens of
primitives like grep, cat, sort, find, pg, cpio, etc that can be piped
together to create almost any command you need on the fly.  There's no need
to write a program to loop through a directory and move all executables to
one or more subdirectories and other files elsewhere.  You can do it on the
command line.

Unix is also multiuser.  That can mean that all those expensive resources
necessary to run the system don't have to be per-user-costs.  Or it can
mean that you don't have to dedicate machines on a LAN to remote dial-in
when you have people on the road.  Or it can mean that your workstation can
enlist others on the network to process some tasks for it when the load gets
too high.  One of my company's subsidiaries has 4 AT's on a LAN dedicated to
a customer support BBS.  What a waste.

Unix also runs on virtually every machine powerful enough to run it.  That
means that your company could have an IBM mainframe for a giant database, a
VAX doing transaction processing, a Cray doing engineering research, and
employees with '286 and '386 pcs, Sun workstations, and Macintoshes on a
single network -- running the same operating system with the same commands
for every task, no matter which machine is doing the work.

Of course, a small business *could* start out with a single '386 running
unix when they have only 8 employees.  When they outgrow that system, they
can select a new system based on the new capacity they need without fear of
losing productivity while employees learn a new set of commands.  Or, they
could buy more PC's.  Hardware becomes a commodity with unix.  Processing
power is already down to around $500 per MIPS on machines that don't already
have a large user base using a proprietary OS on them.  

Don't get me wrong, I think there's a market for OS/2, and that it will do
pretty well.  But the reason for that will not be that it has similar
functionality to unix with a better user interface.  It will be because the
majority of corporate users don't use MS-DOS to it's full (!) potential now,
and they need simplicity more than function in their application launcher.

Office Vision?  Well, IBM has to do something.  Their mainframes think in
EBCDIC and speak synchronously.  PC's think in ASCII and speak
asynchronously.  Businesses want systems integration.  Their solution? 
Write distributed applications that further lock customers into their
proprietary hardware platforms.  ("Was it good for you?"  "Mmmm, made my
toes curl!")  It's a reasonable approach for companies that are married to
IBM, I guess.

It is interesting to note though, that IBM's new President, Jack Kuehler, is
an engineer (the first to hold that post) that has been working on RISC and
UNIX projects for several years.  It's also interesting to see 2-page ads for
AIX in InfoWorld, PCWeek, Byte, and other major publications.  Those ads
aren't cheap.  IBM's new RT3 line looks like it's going to be hot, too.  I'd
say that IBM is hedging it's bets.

"My goodness!", you say.  "Russia is becoming more Democratic and IBM is
selling UNIX!  Surely the Second Coming is not far off!"  Not to worry. 
Gorbachev is still more dictator than president, and IBM is now insisting
that AIX become the center of the unixverse.  Life goes on...

---------------
Bill Kuykendall
Chicago, IL USA
 ...!point!wek
wek@point.UUCP