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From: raveling@vaxb.isi.edu (Paul Raveling)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Unix bigotry
Message-ID: <7541@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 16 Feb 89 17:26:21 GMT
References: <117@spectra.COM> <692@cvbnet2.UUCP> <3101@ficc.uu.net>
Sender: news@venera.isi.edu
Reply-To: raveling@isi.edu (Paul Raveling)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 34

In article <3101@ficc.uu.net> karl@ficc.uu.net (karl lehenbauer) writes:
>
>Although the various Unix bashers each have their own ideas of what's better,
>none of them provide the vendor and architecture independence of Unix.

	That doesn't mean it can't be done -- it just means that
	it's hard to find anyone who's willing to buck the marketing
	risk of developing a new system that might have to run a race
	against the "standard UNIX" bandwagon, no matter how much
	better another system may promise to be.

	MACH is probably the best bet at present, thanks to a
	layer to allow BSD compatibility.  I only regret that
	this seems to be the only viable competitor -- computing
	could benefit by having more candidates for a better
	"standard" operating system.
	
>The writing is on the wall, gentlepeople.  You can sit in your corner with
>technology that's incompatible from what almost everyone else has, and
>maybe do wonderful things.  Your technology may even be superior in some
>ways.

	Darn right.  Living in a "standard" UNIX architecture has 
	presented our project with software engineering obstacles
	that we haven't surmounted.  Our last conclusion was that
	in essence we'd need to build an OS kernel over UNIX in
	order to meet our needs.  That's the hard way -- it would
	be easier to build the kernel under UNIX, as in MACH, but
	that wouldn't be "standard".


----------------
Paul Raveling
Raveling@isi.edu