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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.arch,net.followup,net.micro
Subject: Re: AT&T and the 3B*2
Message-ID: <1971@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 31-May-84 18:41:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.1971
Posted: Thu May 31 18:41:27 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 2-Jun-84 11:15:08 EDT
References: <425@hogpc.UUCP> <2727@brl-vgr.ARPA>
Organization: CCI Office Systems Group, Reston, VA
Lines: 51

> Oh well, so much for UNIX as a standard.  It's amazing how AT&T got up
> at the keynote speach at UNIFORUM and said things like Vendor Independence
> and Standardization, only to go around constantly contradicting these
> fine ideals.

I don't see how not supplying everything in section 1 of the UNIX User's
Manual means that UNIX isn't a standard anymore.  Heck, V6 was the last
UNIX that had a nice compact manual; and 4.xBSD and USG UNIX now have
rather elephantine sections 1.  We supply most of System III on our systems,
and it eats a lot of disk space; we had to make the PWB/Graphics software
an add-on to keep things from getting ridiculous.  A lot of our customers
are just buying an office automation system, and don't need compilers,
"nroff"/"troff", or every nice tool that comes with UNIX.  Some systems
even package the utilities needed for administrative functions into their
application package.  Why force a user to buy what they don't need?

"UNIX as a standard" means "UNIX as an OS that runs on most of the machines
of supermicro and up class which will make it easier for people to develop
applications for the OS, not for the particular machine".  People who need
to develop software can pay the price (in money and disk space) for the
development tools, but not having a C compiler on your machine won't keep
you from running most of the applications out there.  In fact, I suspect
you can run most of the applications out there even if you don't have
"grep"!

Remember, what's good for people whose job involves developing software may
not be good (or necessary) for everybody who uses a computer.  There's
frequently a "developer-centric" attitude among us "real UNIX programmers";
but five years from now, unless UNIX is a marketplace failure, most UNIX
sites won't have any more sophisticated programmer than a COBOL or business
BASIC programmer in-house - if even that.

An analogy - a BMW comes (or, at least, came - I think it's still true) with
a toolkit packed in the trunk.  However, most of the cars on the road are
Chevies, Fords, Oldsmobiles, etc. driven by people who treat their car as
a dumb appliance.  Back in the early days of motoring, you *did* have to
have a complete toolkit and you *did* have to understand some of how the
car worked.  If cars had remained like that, we wouldn't have ~100 million
cars on the road today.  If computers are going to become the everyday
appliances that many people are hoping or proclaiming that they will be,
the attitude that "real computers come with a full suite of development
software (whether you need it or not)" will have to change.  In many ways,
Apple has the right idea - aim your product at the person who needs a
tool to get a job done, not at the person who wants to work on the tool.
Offer development software to people who want it, but don't make it a
standard part of the system unless you can make it cheap enough (in terms
of all resources, including disk space) that it's not worth a customer's
while to pass the tools up.

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