From: johnsonm@lars.acc-admin.stolaf.edu (Michael K. Johnson) Subject: Re: Great marketing (Was Re: BYTE asks, is UNIX dead?) Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 21:38:37 GMT
In article <BvEnpv.Mz1@mtholyoke.edu> jbotz@mtholyoke.edu (Jurgen Botz) writes:
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.
Not to say anything against linux, but a lot of people have
mis-conceptions of Windows NT. The developers edition of the intel
version /exists/. There /are/ bugs... But it is no more single-user
software than linux, except in the minds of some of microsoft's
marketing people. It comes will full tcpip and a full suite of
utilities. ftp, telnet, etc. When you boot it, you have to log in.
It has multiple users, who are protected from each other. It has a
superuser. It is C2 security compliant (though not certified ;-). It
has berkeley sockets (at least internet domain sockets)
It takes significantly more resources than linux, especially in its
developers' edition, but this will be true in the regular release as
well, though not to the same extreme degree. I will /not/ be buying
it unless I have to for a job -- linux is smaller and faster, and
significantly more stable, and will probably remain so for at least a
year or two after VMS -- oops, sorry, WNT ;-) is announced, and
possible longer, judging from microsloth's track record.
It still has the same ugly interface as windows 3.1, and to the best
of my knowledge, no way to create a nicer interface (i.e. motif or
something else that is good) is provided. This, in my opinion, is the
strongest strike against it: I do not want to be locked into the
ugliness of windows. I much prefer any number of available x-servers.
If Microsoft had made an interface so that alternate display servers
were supported, I would think more highly of it. If I am wrong on
this, /please/ tell me -- I want to know.
The Posix compatibility wrapper is not finished as of the last I
checked. When it is, you should be able to compile posix-compliant
apps under WNT as character-mode apps to run in windows. Pity no X
apps... I do not forsee porting apps to be any more difficult than
porting them to, say, NeXTen.
Hope this is helpful to some.
michaelkjohnson