Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!boulder!sunybcs!rutgers!ucla-cs!zen!ucbvax!hplabs!parcvax!burton From: burton@parcvax.Xerox.COM (Philip M. Burton) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: A different View of the value of OS/2 - it's better than UNIX Message-ID: <498@parcvax.Xerox.COM> Date: Sun, 13-Sep-87 14:54:44 EDT Article-I.D.: parcvax.498 Posted: Sun Sep 13 14:54:44 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 15-Sep-87 04:32:49 EDT References: <494@parcvax.Xerox.COM> <961@looking.UUCP> Reply-To: burton@parcvax.xerox.com.UUCP (Philip M. Burton) Organization: Xerox PARC Lines: 112 In article <961@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: >My compliments on an insightful and mostly correct commentary. But there >is more, and this gives Unix a fighting chance: > Thanks. Unfortunately, I came to that conclusion reluctantly. I wish I could decided otherwise. Don't forget that IBM has had several years of selling UNIX on mainframes, on XT's and AT's and with RT's, and you can be sure that they have had people studying it in their research labs. However, I feel that if I were the product planner for the OS/2, I probably would have made the decision NOT to use UNIX. > Unix's command structure can be altered to become less frightening. > Menus etc. are not the answer, as Fortune found out. The main reason > Unix hasn't changed to a more consistent command structure is resistance > from the Unix hacks. > I agree. One of the less-afflicted hack types at Fortune, and believe me, we had some of the best developers around, said that, hey no big deal, just use mv to rename a file. Right!! Just tell that to Joe user. However, menus are part of the answer. For many people, any kind of command line is NOT the answer. That's a good part of the success of the Mac. > > The biggest problem is the difficulty in administering and maintaining a > Unix system. It is still orders of magnitude more difficult than the > "turn it on and run a program" simplicity of DOS. Many of these problems > are not specific to Unix, but are caused by having dynamic, multi-tasking, > multi-user networked environments. OS/2 will fall plague to some of these. > I have to agree and disagree. Any multi-user system would have many of these problems. Could you imagine, in your wildest dreams, putting IBM's MVS on a PC. I'm sure that a 386 would have the horsepower to do it, but who would want JCL and its horrible cousins. At the same time, until you make fundamental, and I do mean that, changes to UNIX, for example the filesystem fragility, lack of true random access, you don't have a PERSONAL operating system. Now, if you did make all those changes, would it still be UNIX??? > The big advantage Unix has is that Unix for the 80386 is available now. > OS/2 for the 386 is predicted by Microsoft to be over a year away. If > the delivery is anything like that for MS Windows, well.... > In 1981, the only software for IBM PC's was CP/M based, and people actually went out and bought CP/M co-processor boards for the PC's. The early public domain club software disks were all CP/M reworks. But by 1983, interest in CP/M was gone from the mass market. In 1984, I worked briefly for a company that needed a CP/M co-processor card, and by then, the CP/M co-processor card was moribund. > In the interim people writing 386 software will have only one OS to > run it under. Thus all new 386 applications will be developed for Unix > (and other, non-OS/2 systems that come on-line) See my comments above about CP/M. > > Thus Unix will be the system that runs the old software and the new, > and this will help it overcome the other perceived troubles. > >The alternative to this is that the 386 suffers the fate of the 286 -- simply >being used as a fast version of its predecessor. I hope we don't see this. > >-- >Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473 No, that conclusion about UNIX doesn't follow. UNIX will not run software written for OS/2. And even if it were true, my "marketing gut" tells me that the advantages of UNIX over OS/2, even if true, will not be enough to sway most people in the great mass market from going to OS/2. I'm sure that IBM will "fix" the problem with a native 386 version of OS/2. However, I recently heard that the 386 isn't the real long-term solution because it can't run multiple virtual versions of itself. And, the REAL solution was the followon chip, which would allow multiple virtual OS/2's. IBM will certainly bring out a 386 native version of OS/2, when it's time to obsolete the AT's and all the 286 machines on the market, or at least differentiate their model 80 (and its unannounced cousins) from other systems. I'm going to hazard a guess and estimate a mid-89 announcement for OS/2 for the 386. Sorry, guys. I like UNIX. I really do. What got me started on all this was the prospect that MicroPort has a UNIX that I could actually afford to buy just to hack around with. Remember I'm not a developer, so it wold be mainly a toy to play with. Then I started thinking of the incredible hassles that I would have to put up with to get uucp news up, or whatever. Just not worth it. And if I don't want to do it, and I'm faily technical for a non-developer (at least the guys at work tell me that), then it's a hopeless situation for the person who buys a PC just to do spreadsheets of maintain a database. -- Philip Burton burton@parcvax.COM ...!hplabs!parcvax!burton Xerox Corp. preferred path: burton.osbunorth@xerox.COM 408 737 4635 ... usual disclaimers apply ...