From: jbotz@mtholyoke.edu (Jurgen Botz) Subject: Re: Great marketing (Was Re: BYTE asks, is UNIX dead?) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 19:05:54 GMT
In article <BvB0JA.7tr@ibmpcug.co.uk> gtoal@ibmpcug.co.uk (Graham Toal) writes:
>Unfortunately I fear you may be wrong. Note the "Dec" above. Windows NT
>is being targeted at the new Dec ultra-fast 64bit Risc line, which
>Microsoft will use as a stepping stone into the real computer
>market.
But the Alpha computers will also be running OSF/1 and VMS, and somehow
I have a funny feeling that it'll be a while before someone will be willing
to run a SINGLE-USER operating system on a machine that could support
several dozen X-terminals or hundreds of users on tty lines (these babies
will also cost a bit, even in desktop workstation packages.)
Meanwhile you'll be able to get a 60Mhz 486 computer with accellerated
graphics and a nice monitor and a FREE MULTI-USER OS, all for a couple
of grand. I dunno, Microsoft is sure to sell a lot of copies of NT,
but their shooting for being the operating system standard of the future,
and I think they missed that mark long before they started to fire. Maybe
if NT had come out two or three years ago and could run reasonably on
todays mid-range hardware it would be different, but they didn't, and it
can't.
>Rumour has it that the Dec port of NT is actually ahead of
>the Dos version... what i see happening is that people will be able
>to use this to move their software away from DOS and [345]86 architectures
>which will then die out, but Microsoft will survive because they're already
>heading in this new direction :-(
I don't believe that the [345]86 architectures are going to die out.
In the contrary. The hardware has just achieved the level where just
about everything you'll want to do on a desktop is possible with those
chips, and the only thing holding them back is MS-DOS (which _is_
dying out). Just wait until SGI comes out with a PC-sized version of
the IRIS chip set (or some other company with something similar) and
you can do real-time 3-D graphic animations on your desktop intel
machine which you bought from a Taiwanese no-name brand for $1,000...
who needs a stinking 200Mhz Alpha? Not me... I'll take an SGI Indigo
over that any day, and soon a Intel-based machine with an accellerated
graphics card will blow away today's Indigo. If I need real
heavy-duty number crunching I'll use a real-supercomputer... on my
desktop I need something that's fast enough to run my compiler, my
typesetter, and most of all: something that can do whatever I want to
do with my display.
No, the architecture is not dead... all it needs is a real operating
system (like, ahem, Linux) and then we could stop hardware advancement
and software would still continue to evolve (to catch up!) for another
20 years.