Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!husc6!m2c!jjmhome!cpoint!alien
From: alien@cpoint.UUCP (Alien Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: 640K limit
Message-ID: <3563@cpoint.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jan 90 23:01:53 GMT
References: <4668.25aed7f2@uwovax.uwo.ca> <1468@blackbird.afit.af.mil> <28808@amdcad.AMD.COM> <2021@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <28824@amdcad.AMD.COM> <2026@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Reply-To: alien@cpoint.UUCP (Alien Wells)
Organization: Clearpoint Research Corp., Hopkinton Mass.
Lines: 55

In article <2026@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
>  I don't buy this at all. Users want to get things done, and they are
>not about to buy a program because it needs more MB or does
>multi-tasking. Unless the application does something the that can't be
>done on a smaller (cheaper) machine, neither the personal user nor the
>company will spend the money to get a bigger, slower, o/s and add memory
>to run it.

Gee ... this sort of sounds like the 64K CP/M & Apple II vs 640K DOS 
arguments ... doesn't it ...

>  Until we get a "killer app" (I think Jim Seymore used that term first)
>people won't rush into os/2.

I see ... and just what "killer app" was it that made the PC?  I had thought
the PC was based on spreadsheets and word processors, and those were all 
available for CP/M machines and Apple IIs.  Granted, 1-2-3 was somewhat
better than CP/M Visicalc, but no more than OS/2 1-2-3 release 3.0 is better 
than DOS 1-2-3 release 2.2 is (and do you really want to promote imcompatible, 
home-brew DOS extenders with DOS 1-2-3 release 3.0? ...), and 1-2-3 over 
Visicalc was certainly less of a change than Beta reviewers of 1-2-3/G say it 
is over 1-2-3 3.0 ... (See the current PC Week ...)

>And with unix interfaces like Motif, and X,
>and millions of existing unix boxes to run applications, there are good
>reasons for software vendors to chase that market first. I suspect that
>there are 100 times as many Sun users as os/2 (just to name one vendor),
>and these users are used to paying three to ten times as much for
>software as the PC users.

Ah ... yeah.  Right.  From the Wednesday 17 January Wall Street Journal:
	[This year's expected sales of] 150,000 Sun workstations.
This is across ALL of Sun's lines.  This is compared to and expected 1,000,000
Macintoshes and many, many million PC compatibles going out the door this
year.

And besides, I thought that Sun was in the Open-Look (ie: piss on Motif)
camp?  The nice thing about Unix standards is there are so many of them
to choose from ...

Finally, if you want quantity of units and shrink-wrapping - you want to hit 
the binary compatible 386 market (ie: the PCs running Unix).  What sort of
standard graphical shell do we have there?  Gee, I'm running on one now and
I don't have ANY.  I've seen X (a co-worker insists on using it to get
multi-tasking in separate windows) and I wouldn't consider the XT-like
performance of text under X.  (Gee ... is that where the name X-windows came 
from? ;-)  I thought you valued speed (from the rest of your posting).  OS/2 
and PM are BLINDING in comparison with Unix and X!  X-windows REQUIRES a 
graphics co-processor on the graphics board that implements the entire X 
protocol in hardware to be acceptable.  I will grant that these are coming, 
but they will cost ...
-- 
--------|	I die ... you die ... we all die ...
Alien   |   		- the Heavy Metal movie
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