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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: AT&T and the 3B2 (in defense of partitioning)
Message-ID: <2005@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 9-Jun-84 04:43:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.2005
Posted: Sat Jun  9 04:43:33 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 10-Jun-84 01:07:12 EDT
References: <1986@rlgvax.UUCP> <4295@edai.UUCP>
Organization: CCI Office Systems Group, Reston, VA
Lines: 66

>      Given that the text formatters have been split off into a separate
> package, I foresee a boom in "roff" lookalikes powerful enough to format
> new manual pages.  Standardisation was great while it lasted.  (Have
> AT&T noticed that TEX82 is public domain?...)

Depends on the market.  I suspect the typical UNIX user five years from
now (who will probably, *noli voli*, not look like us) may never see
"UNIX" *per se*.  They'll probably talk to the computer through a tightly-
sealed application interface, or possibly through a "desktop" shell *a la*
Xerox PARC's systems, Lisa, Mac, etc..  They may never even *see* the
UNIX manual.

Look at it this way; yes, you can buy shop manuals for your car, and
all the specialized tools you need to work on it.  Most people don't.
And if it's a company car, almost nobody does.

>      Guy Harris says let the market decide.  But there is no reason at
> all to expect the market to converge on a rational approach.  There are
> quite a few places over here planning to switch from 4.1 to System V.2
> when/if V.2 sees the light of day;

(It already has, at least on this side of the big pond.)

> not because they know it to be technically superior (or indeed because
> they've been able to find out anything much about it; I was at a meeting
> where a manufacturer's representative told us that we didn't want 4.?bsd
> because V.2 had everything we wanted, and then answered most specific
> questions by saying he hadn't the faintest idea and wouldn't have until AT&T
> let his company have the documentation) but simply because of the magic of
> the AT&T name.  The market will go in whatever direction minimises present
> fear, not future regret.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Just ask the current owners of
DECSystem-10s and DECSystem-20s (not the universities, the commercial
customers) how they feel about the flyer they took, now that DEC's canned
the top-of-the-20-line Jupiter project.  Technological superiority isn't
everything.  Iron isn't the only thing that costs money.  A case *can* be
made for picking up S5R2 instead of 4.1BSD; if S5R2 had paging, it'd be
a very strong case.  Most "straightforward" software can be made to run
under any "V7 derivative" (meaning just about anything except 4.2BSD, and
even there the differences aren't *too* bad as long as you know they're
there), but not all packages *will* be made to run under all such flavors
of UNIX.  Furthermore, a lot of customers will buy S5R2 for the support,
although that may change now that DEC's offering Ultrix-32.

>      Yours in waiting for GNU.

I'll believe in GNU when I see a copy, and I'll believe it succeeds when
the number of GNU sites greatly exceeds the number of UNIX sites.  Not
before.  Lauren Weinstein discussed rather cogently the risks of a system
with the "freedom to hack" proposed for GNU, and the likelihood of the
proliferation of incompatible versions of the beast, a while ago.

I say "let the marketplace decide" because I think a lot of us are
arguing from the point of view of a UNIX hacker with an emotional attachment
to the system we grew up with.  Well, it's not that system any more.  Yes,
it may not be sold under the same terms as we've gotten used to.  As I
said before, "that's capitalism".  No moral judgement intended.  AT&T isn't
selling UNIX for the goodwill anymore; they're in it for the long green.
If you want to engage in behavior modification, you'll have to understand
their reward and punishment system, and reward them by buing their product
or punish them by not buying it.  Moral suasion won't do it unless you can
back it up with something to make their bean-counters sit up and take notice.

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy