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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: Who's Next?
Message-ID: <1521@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Jan-84 16:37:08 EST
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.1521
Posted: Thu Jan  5 16:37:08 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Jan-84 02:34:59 EST
References: <227@dsd.UUCP>
Organization: CCI Office Systems Group, Reston, VA
Lines: 81


	I also agree that UNIX will *NOT* be the next major O.S. for micro's.
	In order for something to beat out CPM, it has to have more advantages
	than dissadvantages.

By this, do you mean "UNIX can't be worse than CPM in the following
cases?"  If so...

	For the novice user, UNIX just plain stinks.  It us hard to use.

What specifically is hard to use about it?  Most OSs can be considered "hard
to use", especially by a total novice.

	It is cryptic.

Yes, it uses the horrible cryptic syntax

	cp filea fileb

to copy "filea" to "fileb", instead of the very logical and obvious

	PIP fileb=filea

that CP/M uses.

	It has horrible error messages.

Unlike the clear and understandable "BDOS ERROR ON A:".

	And lastly is is much too easy to do horrible damage to your
	files without even trying (very hard).

Are you referring to the non-crashproofness of the file system, which has
been fixed in several versions, or to the ability to accidentally do
an "rm *" and delete all your files?

	Further (as has also been mentioned several times before)
	it requires excessive amounts of central memory and disc
	storage.

Yes, for a small floppy-based single-user, single-tasking system, where the
user doesn't need all the hundreds of commands UNIX comes with, it could
be considered excessive.  However, UNIX is a minicomputer operating system
and makes the same demands for system resources as other such operating
systems do.

	Lastly, the multi-tasking features of UNIX (at least all the
	implementations I have inventigated) are buried so far down into the
	KERNEL that user programs can not use them.  (yeah, I know you can
	pipe things all over the place and spawn processes, but get them
	to talk to each other in real time.)

This is a deficiency of UNIX, but both System V and 4.2BSD have faster
interprocess message mechanisms, and System V has and 4.3BSD will (with any
luck) have a shared memory facility (S5 already has semaphores to synchronize
usage of shared memory).

	Why should anyone WANT to use UNIX (other than the 'fad' aspect of it).

Because it has a lot of *useful* power?
Because a lot of code written for it can be ported to many different computers?

	  No, I don't believe that UNIX(tm) is the next popular O.S. for
	micros.

The market seems to show signs of disagreeing...

I think the popular claims that "UNIX is user-hostile" or that "UNIX is
fragile" or that "UNIX doesn't support commercial applications well" should
be subject to VERY critical review.  For one thing, it's not clear that its
command language is that much "worse" than other similar systems; face it,
almost every command language out there has a lot of aspects which will not
be obvious to people not acquainted with computers.  And when it is said
that "UNIX" lacks robustness, or good facilities to allow cooperating processes
to interact, or whatever, one should make sure one specifies which version of
UNIX one is talking about; later versions of "standard" UNIX have cleared
a lot of these problems up, and several vendors have corrected them in their
versions of UNIX.

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy