Path: utzoo!dptcdc!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!gatech!ukma!cwjcc!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Why unix doesn't catch on Message-ID: <13573@ncoast.ORG> Date: 16 Apr 89 18:18:10 GMT References: <7632@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <256@jwt.UUCP> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: comp.sys.ibm.pc Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh Lines: 48 As quoted from <256@jwt.UUCP> by john@jwt.UUCP (John Temples): +--------------- | In article <7632@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> C. Antonio Romero writes: | >Well, for one thing, not all Unixes come with C compilers. I suppose | >one could require that they did, but this would swell the size of Unix. | | True, but I can't imagine anyone having something as powerful as Unix without | having a C compiler to go with it. It seems like a waste. +--------------- Tell that to our clients. It *IS* annoying, but also common. +--------------- | Gimpel Software is making their PC-Lint product available in something called | "shrouded source". It lets you compile the software on your target machine, | without being able to make sense of the source code. I don't know how viable | this technique is, but it seems like it could have possibilities. +--------------- The OSF recently released an RFT for this kind of technology, the idea being that one could shrink-wrap software to run on ANY OSF/1 host: the software is supplied as machine-independent pseudo-code, and a special compiler supplied with OSF/1 will compile it into native code. (Personal opinion: it's gonna have to be a D*MN good compiler to be able to produce code that runs reasonably well from low-level code that can't assume anything about the processor environment.) +--------------- | >We all hear horror stories about how resource-intensive OS/2 is, and | | I don't know how resource intensive OS/2 is, but I doubt it's any more so than | 386 Unix. I would consider 4MB of RAM and an 80 MB drive as a _minimum_ | configuration under which to run 386 Unix with DOS Merge as a single user +--------------- The key words being "DOS Merge". I have a 2MB AT386 with Oracle on it in my apartment at the moment (borrowed from the office); it runs fine. If I want to use DOS, I'll use my own machine. And with more DOS programs coming out for use under native Unix all the time, VP/ix or DOS-Merge looks less and less interesting all the time. (It has a 60MB RLL drive, if you care.) But it takes 4MB to run OS/2 plus SQL Server, from what I hear. ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc allbery@ncoast.org uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!allbery ncoast!allbery@hal.cwru.edu Send comp.sources.misc submissions to comp-sources-misc@ NCoast Public Access UN*X - (216) 781-6201, 300/1200/2400 baud, login: makeuser