Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!percival!gary
From: gary@percival.UUCP (Gary Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Powerful machines at home
Summary: Maybe more than you think
Keywords: POWER USERS
Message-ID: <1336@percival.UUCP>
Date: 30 Aug 88 22:01:51 GMT
References: <6646@well.UUCP> <5479@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> <4617@fluke.COM> <8214@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <2815@teemc.UUCP> <11704@oberon.USC.EDU> <3144@teemc.UUCP> <1031@bucket.UUCP>
Reply-To: gary@percival.UUCP (Gary Wells)
Organization: Percy's UNIX, Portland, OR.
Lines: 39

In article <1031@bucket.UUCP> leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson) writes:
>In article <3144@teemc.UUCP> wayne@teemc.UUCP (/\/\ichael R. \/\/ayne) writes:
><>you say all your friends run UN*X at home, and then you describe this machine
><>that would be the envy of any hobbyist and cost a good $7k (price I just
><>dreamed up) that YOU have at home.
>
>Given the fact that expensive computers are less popular as toys than
>expensive cars, I doubt that anything over $5k will *ever* be considered
>a "home" system. That doesn't mean that no one will use them at home, just
>that it will be unusual.

Sorry, Leonard, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong.  Just count the number of 
boxes running *nix in the Portland area that I know you know of, then double 
that (at least) for the ones you don't know of.  I'm just talking about the ones
in peoples homes, not places like Reed or Tek.  _I_ know of about 10-20, 
depending on who's up and whether you count multiple machines at a single site.
The _typical_ user, you are correct, will always be using whatever is currently
popular, be it C-64, Apple, or IBM.  And those machines won't disappear, and 
will continue to serve their owners in some capacity.  But the serious users
will find a way to have a serious system, with multi-megabytes of disk and 
multiple I/O ports.  *nix looks to be the most serious contender for an OS for
these systems for the near future.  (I'm not saying it is the best.  I've seen
ads for O/S's that sounded "better", but I'm never actually seen one of those
in the field).  

I don't intend to strain my arm too much patting ourselves on the back for being
"serious" users, but it is still the case that we, relatively few, will continue
to set the standards by which all other systems will be judged.  Remember when
MS-DOS was new?  Remember all the hoopla about how it was "like *nix, with
pipes and directories"?  It turned out that "like" has a lot of slop in it, but
my point is still valid.  They were using *nix as the comparison standard.  I
don't think Microsoft would be so paranoid about *nix, if _they_ didn't think it
was the reference, too.

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Still working on _natural_ intelligence.

gary@percival   (...!tektronix!percival!gary)