Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ncar!oddjob!uwvax!rutgers!mtune!mtunx!whuts!paul
From: paul@whuts.UUCP (HO)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: "It's snake oil, absolute snake oil"
Message-ID: <3976@whuts.UUCP>
Date: 23 Mar 88 05:04:09 GMT
References: <183@mcf.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 29
Keywords: Ken Olsen DEC UNIX

> 	Olsen went on to call Unix "one of the most proprietary operating system
> 
> 	"But that's the unimportant part of making things interchangeable",
> 	he said. Compatibility "doesn't come by stamping Unix on the label.
> 	It doesn't solve everything; there is no magic. It's snake oil,
> 	absolute snake oil," he said.

Do you want to know what is snake oil? DEC gets UNIX System V,
from AT&T, and everything comes along with it. Then they put in
an UDA driver, and called it DEC UNIX System V. With the UDA driver,
they broke "sar -d", so instead of fixing sar, they wrote a
"dusar". With the DEC new sar, one has to be root to look at
disk activity. Also, the output of dusar is definitely VMSish, ie,
it has brain-damaged headers. Try it, you will know what I mean.

Also Olsen said DEC UNIX System V is better than AT&T System V. I
read that in Digital News, when DEC lost that court battle about
System V being too vender proprietary. How is it that DEC is better?
By putting in 50 people at Holmdel with less that a few years of
UNIX know-how? 

Last I heard, the DEC System V's uarea is going to be 6K instead
of the now 2K. Yes, I know they are in the business of selling
memory broads. Amdahl's UTS, which does a hell of a lot than
DEC System V, has 4K uarea. Of course, UTS's uarea has to be
in core all the time. That kind of defeat the purpose of
separating the proc from user, and Amdahl is also in the
business of selling memory broads.

	Paul Ho