Xref: utzoo comp.sys.dec:946 comp.arch:7903
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From: snoopy@sopwith.UUCP (Snoopy)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec,comp.arch
Subject: Re: DECstation 3100 info.
Message-ID: <93@sopwith.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jan 89 18:48:56 GMT
References: <979@isieng.UUCP> <85330@sun.uucp> <VIXIE.89Jan14123901@bacchus.pa.dec.com> <558@oracle.UUCP>
Reply-To: snoopy@sopwith.UUCP (Snoopy)
Organization: The Daisy Hill Puppy Farm
Lines: 60

In article <558@oracle.UUCP> rbradbur@oracle.UUCP (Robert Bradbury) writes:

| We have had to expand our computer room
| 3 times in the last 3 years to fit in all the machines from various vendors
| running different flavors of the UNIX operating system.

To properly test your code, you'd have to do this anyway, ABI or no.

| The 88000 group is wisely starting out up front by standardizing on an ABI.

Is it carved in stone somewhere that any box using a m88k must adhere
to the ABI?

| The reason UNIX has taken so long to succeed in the market place
| is because there was no application software.  The reason that there
| was no application software is because application vendors cannot
| afford the machines, development time, support staff, etc. to support
| 14 different flavors of UNIX for each hardware platform out there.

I seem to remember a quote along the lines of "It is easier to port Unix
to a new machine than to port a major application to a new OS."  Perhaps
you'd prefer that your roomfull of machines all have very different OSes?
Perhaps you could look into porting your one favorite flavor of Unix to
all the boxes rather than porting your app to all the flavors of Unix? :-)

| Yes, research people would like BSD 4.3.  A great environment for research,
| but not one that can support a high performance RDBMS due to its lack of
| robust IPC primitives.  I'll take a real O.S. that conforms to the SVID
| any day of the week.

SVID, a great environment for porting RDBMS, but not one that can support
high performance research.

You can yell and scream about bringing all the various versions together
all you want, but if you want any progress, if you want things to ever
improve over where they are at the time the mightly standard is set, then
people are going to do research and add features and change things around.
Other people are going to hear about this and pick up some of the changes
that they like.  And from time to time, some of these changes are going
to break your application.  Sorry, but that's the way it is.

As far as the AT&T ABI thing, perhaps you missed it, but a lot of people
were/are unhappy with the way AT&T wants things to be.  Note the OSF,
the mere existance of which is pretty amasing.

Are there too many versions of Unix?  Maybe.  Is ABI the solution?
Probably not.  Is there a solution?  Probably not, at least if you
want things like progress and competition.  Not everything can be done
in libraries.

Did DEC do the right thing making their new box little-endian?  Sounds
like a bugfix to me.  A big-endian lover would disagree.  A "all machines
from this company should be compatible" person would agree.  A "all machines
based on this cpu chip should be compatible" person would disagree.

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