Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!hubcap!gatech!rutgers!att!ulysses!andante!alice!debra
From: debra@alice.UUCP (Paul De Bra)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: proprietary OSs
Message-ID: <8575@alice.UUCP>
Date: 20 Dec 88 22:08:21 GMT
References: <205@imspw6.UUCP> <4330119@hpindda.HP.COM> <5254@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: debra@alice.UUCP ()
Organization: AT&T, Bell Labs
Lines: 50

In article <5254@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>(Moving this from comp.sys.ibm.pc to comp.unix.questions.)
>
>In article <4330119@hpindda.HP.COM> hardin@hpindda.HP.COM (John Hardin) writes:
>>While I agree with your prediction of
>>the role of Unix in the next few years, I can also see why there continue
>>to be propietary OSs.  One reason is the inefficiencies of Unix.  I am no
>>Unix kernel expert, so I don't pretend to know why, but I have seen that
>>a propietary OS can support many more time-sharing users than Unix when
>>both are run on the same hardware.
>
>Counterarguments are possible.  For example:
>
>o    Proprietary OSs often support more users than UNIX by restricting
>     what these users can do.  For example, they may not allow job
>     control (only one active job) or make it inconvenient;  they may
>     not allow pipes (got to go via disk files, slowing things down,
>     so it seems like more people are doing work but each person
>     is getting less done);  they may not have many of the UNIX
>     utilities like mail, wc, grep, awk, etc., so you just don't
>     do those things at all
>

I fully agree with Rahul. Several years ago I worked on a Vax 11/780 with
VMS, mostly used by physicists running batch jobs and editing using a line-
oriented editor (except for some who used edt on a vt100).

Then my (beginning computer science) department started using (Gosling) Emacs,
and started getting complaints that we were slowing down the machine.
Later I developed a few m-lisp functions for calling the Vax Pascal compiler
or Tex from Emacs, and automatically pop up a window with the error messages
and jump to the right line in the main window...
It took about 3 days before the physics department decided that this could
not be allowed and installed a limit of 1 job per user.

So this "highly efficient" operating system was only efficient if nobody
tried to do anything like what one does all the time on Unix.

Shortly thereafter we got a small 68000-based Unix box which worked much
more efficiently for us, because we could get the same job done in less time.

For similar reasons I prefer to run Unix (Xenix) on my PC instead of the
supposedly more efficient MS-DOS, because with Unix I can get the job done
in less time.

Paul.
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