From: mike@ws.rz.tu-bs.de (Mike Dowling) Subject: Re: Sneak preview of the Intel port of NeXT's operating system Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1993 12:04:41 GMT
> The Battle of the Operating Systems heated up substantially on February
> 10, 1993 when NeXT Computer, Inc. announced that it was getting out of the
> black box (NeXT hardware) business and becoming solely a software company.
> Although there has been a mixed reaction in the NeXT community about this
> change of direction, most NeXT users were just as attracted to the NeXT
> world by its operating system "NeXTSTEP" as much as by the sleak, black
> hardware.
> NeXTSTEP has a "super-Mac-like" graphical user interface, a wealth of
> powerful networking, communication and system administration utilities,
> and a dynamite application development environment. It would truly be a
> tragedy to see such an elegant operating system go down with a hardware
> ship. Anyway, it has been said that computer hardware is becoming merely a
> commodity. The real power and innovation in the computer industry is now
> in the hands of the software houses, and in particular those which control
> the direction of operating system development.
Frankly, this idea that there should be one and only one OS for the whole world
is quite ridiculus! Anyone who thinks that the OSs of the world must do battle
with one another is thinking very small. I know, it is "main stream" thinking,
but that does not make it any better. The fact is that you will, for example,
never pursuade UNIX users to use DOS or its derivitives like OS/2 or WINDOWS
NT. Similarly, most of the users of these OSs won't touch UNIX. Why should
they if they are happy as they are? The only villains of the peace are those
who try to force one or other OS down our throats. Frankly, just as this bloke
goes into raptures of ecstasy over his NEXT, and good on him I say, for me and
many UNIX users the lack of a command line and with it the lack of our UNIX
utilities is a nightmare. I wouldn'y touch it with a ten foot barge pole!
What is it about OSs that makes people so evangelical? If I complain about
this windows driven, object oriented gunge, people protest vociferously that it
is the "modern way". Who gives a damn if it is modern? Each to his own, I
say. This goes for linux users as well, who, it seems to me, are often also
infected with this evangelical bug. Why post this sort of thing on an
overcrowded list like this?
Mike Dowling