Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!fed!arccs2!m1phm02 From: m1phm02@fed.frb.gov (Patrick H. McAllister) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc Subject: Re: Microsoft And Friends Message-ID: Date: 16 Nov 90 17:17:10 GMT References: <4624@gara.une.oz.au> <1990Nov9.193424.1196@amd.com> <1990Nov11.174012.9566@gupta.portal.com> <1990Nov15.191312.13301@amd.com> Sender: news@fed.FRB.GOV Organization: Federal Reserve Board Lines: 42 In-reply-to: phil@brahms.amd.com's message of 15 Nov 90 19:13:12 GMT In article <1990Nov15.191312.13301@amd.com> phil@brahms.amd.com (Phil Ngai) writes: In article <1990Nov11.174012.9566@gupta.portal.com> few@gupta.portal.com (Frank Whaley) writes: |In article <1990Nov9.193424.1196@amd.com> phil@brahms.amd.com (Phil Ngai) writes: |>Actually, OS/2 has more sophisticated technology than Unix. | |I tried long and hard to stay out of this, but I've heard this argument |too many times without a single line of proof. Can anyone name even |one example of 'more sophisticated technology' available in OS/2 that |is not available in at least one flavor of Unix? Here's another aspect: price. How much would you have to pay to get Unix with a GUI? I see Interactive advertising X Windows for $695, if I understand their ad correctly. Is this in addition to Unix? Ouch. And what kind of applications can you get for it? At what price? The lowest price that I have seen for a complete package is SCO, offering UNIX, X, plus X.desktop (so that the package is actually useful straight out of the box), at a price of about a grand. (Unless my memory is confused and it was someone else making that offer at that price . . .). Someone posted a followup about how much they got "free" off the MIT distribution -- having played with some of that stuff, it seems to me that it is only free if you are not the person paying for the hours of time required to port it (unless you happen to be running the same type of machine as the author -- in spite of the "portability" of UNIX software, somehow I find myself having to do some porting on about half of the stuff I get). Back to the original question, about advanced technology; my candidate, assuming it actually works, is the way in which the scheduler gives priority to the task with which the user is currently interacting. (I say "assuming . . ." because I haven't used OS/2 myself, but only read about it). On my Sun, I find it extremely frustrating to start typing away into EMACS and not even have my keystrokes echoed for several seconds, I assume because EMACS has been paged out since I have't typed anything for a little while. Has anyone ever put a scheduler into UNIX that is designed to maximize interactive responsiveness for a single user, rather than to maximize total system throughput? Pat