From: talley@ashleigh.Kodak.COM (Brian K. Talley) Subject: Re: BYTE asks, is UNIX dead? Date: 28 Sep 1992 16:50:06 GMT
In article <12945@ecs.soton.ac.uk> nwp90@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Nick Phillips) writes:
[original posting deleted]
>I haven't read the article in question, but I remember about 10 years ago, BYTE
>had a similar cover asking "Is this the year of UNIX?". Don't worry about it,
>they're just trying to ask provocative questions, and in the process, sell
>magazines... who cares what they think, anyway? With systems like Linux & 386BSD
>only now beginning to make UNIX-like systems available to the average person
>with a PC box at home, at a reasonable price, how can it be dead? Maybe they were
>just referring to AT&T's UNIX... now that it has a bit of competition ;-)
>
>Nick.
My concern involves an authoritative journal like Byte slamming or pushing a
product (or OS). "Authoritative" is defined as something a lot of people use
to make decisions, by the way. This use of "authoritative" has nothing to do
with actual knowledge about anything.
How many folks have been told MS-DOS is God's gift to computing? How many have
spent a lot of money on inferior IBM compatibles?
I saw the same thing happen to the Commodore Amiga. When it was released, it
was ahead of it's time. It had superior graphics, sound and I/O slave proces-
sors that allowed it to run considerably faster in typical applications than
just about anything else available (in the personal computer market). It also
had (has) an operating system vastly superior to MS-DOS. Due to Commodore's
unbelievably inept and incompetant marketing department, the Amiga has slipped,
and many now consider it dead. It certainly isn't - there's still a huge fol-
lowing - but it's not as "alive" as it could/should be.
Fortunately with Unix, AT&T, DEC, SMI, SGI, HP, etc., aren't going to let some
company like Microsoft get away with telling the world that Unix is dead, and
NT is the way to go, but MS may try. This is what bothers me. By "not caring"
what the proverbial technotwits think, we (unix users) lose a little bit.
Linux is an excellent OS, both for learning and for serious work. It is because
of large companies depending on Unix and Unix-like clones that Unix isn't dead,
and won't be for quite some time (if ever :).
AT&T has had competition for a while now, and up until now, they haven't said
much (pubically) about it, either. Exactly why they chose to flex their corp-
orate muscles now remains to be seen. Perhaps until recently, BSD hadn't really
advertized their product: it was limited to use by schools, for the most part.
Now that BSDI has advertized, AT&T/USL may be getting concerned.
[please try to keep the flames down to "deep fat fry"]
--Brian [Let's start a comp.os.linux.advocacy newsgroup] Talley
__________
Brian Talley, Systems Consultant, Eastman Kodak Research Labs, Rochester, NY
talley@acadia.kodak.com