Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1+some 2/3/84; site dual.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!dual!mats From: mats@dual.UUCP (Mats Wichmann) Newsgroups: net.followup,net.micro Subject: Re: AT&T and the 3B*2 Message-ID: <567@dual.UUCP> Date: Wed, 6-Jun-84 09:13:37 EDT Article-I.D.: dual.567 Posted: Wed Jun 6 09:13:37 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 7-Jun-84 07:48:51 EDT References: <425@hogpc.UUCP> <2727@brl-vgr.ARPA>, <1971@rlgvax.UUCP> <692@cp1.UUCP> <1983@rlgvax.UUCP> Organization: Dual Systems, Berkeley, CA Lines: 76 > For years we have described Unix as a very > powerful software tool kit. I don't know why > that description should be scrapped. Are the > users outside the old Bell System that different? Yes, they are. While many of the *CURRENT* users are probably on a technical level at least comparable to what exists inside AT&T Bell Labs, the market I am selling to, and which many of the other readers of this net are selling to, and which represent our mealticket for the next few years, consists of a large number of people who are not concerned with how easy or elegant it is to build a solution to a problem, they want the solution ready-to-buy. I don't like this; I would like to sell to research labs who know as much as/more than I do, but the economic realities are that this is not the segment of the potential market that has the money to spend. What is needed to appeal to these people is not the toolkit, but what the skilled carpenter has built with the toolkit. Guy Harris: > UNIX is a lot of things: it's a portable OS, it's an OS which doesn't make > life difficult by excessive idiot-proofing (for instance, you're not forced > to use one of a small set of OS-supplied file formats), and it's an OS which > comes with a lot of tools and facilities to glue those tools together. > The third is useful to those shops with the expertise to build systems out > of those tools *and* willing to put up with the limitations of those tools; > the second is useful to application developers, and as such indirectly useful > to the user community; but, frankly, the first is the reason it'll make it > in the mass market. If you consider it *only* to be a powerful software > tool kit, its appeal will be considerably limited. Remember, few of the > potential customers for computers are as sophisticated as "we" are. That > description shouldn't be scrapped, but it shouldn't be a definition, either. To my mind, UNIX is a concept, not a product. We have a system that works tolerably well; the future depends what we can do with the building blocks we now have. The portability question is important to everybody, but on different levels. For a hardware company, it means you can build a piece of hardware, and for a `reasonable' cost you can get a powerful OS running, without having to invest in a large staff and waiting several years. For the software developer, it is heaven - a system that allows a piece of software to be moved to many different vendors' hardware (thus increasing potential market greatly) without much trouble. For the end-user, it means that software developed and proven on one machine is likely to run on another. What is the reality? Well, right now, hardware companies are starting to realise that they have lost two very important things in going to a so-called `standard' UNIX system: the lock-in that has traditionally meant continuing revenues (okay, tell me why a customer would continue to buy my machine if Bozinski Computers comes with the Roboz-III, which costs 1/2 of what my machine does, runs the same software, and does it three times as fast. All of a sudden things like support and expandability matter a whole lot less in closing an end-user sale), and it also means that the hardware is probably not being used at anywhere its' theoretical maximum. Customers are still fighting all of the hype which says that UNIX is the be-all, end-all, solution to everything, and finding that the reality is that even finding a simple solution like a good word processor is much more difficult than it should be. Have you yet seen a word processor on UNIX that takes advantage of what the machine can do as well as Wordstar did for 8080-Z80 systems? (Shuts up about NROFF, have you ever tried to support it on a commercial level for novice users????). Face it folks, we have a *LONG* way to go. What *I* would like to see are things like good solid support for VM, so that we could handle things like shared libraries (bring standard modules in at run-time, instead of at compile time, (have you ever considered how much disk and memory space is taken up by the standard `hello.c' program?? Outrageous to waste resources like that!!!)), and an intelligent way to reconfigure the OS during run-time, instead of compile-time. Imagine an expandable, object-based UNIX system kernel, with shared library routines. An operating system should aid in providing solutions to be commercially successful; so far we only provide tools. Thoughts on this diatribe??? Personal flames, are okay.... Mats Wichmann Dual Systems Corp. ...{ucbvax,amd70,ihnp4,cbosgd,decwrl,fortune}!dual!mats