From: brian%jaguar.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Brian Sturgill)
Subject: Re: Microsoft bashing (Well, not exactly....)
Date: 8 Sep 92 14:54:48 MDT
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept

In article <9zrn-ja.xtifr@netcom.com> xtifr@netcom.com (Chris Waters) writes:
>In <1992Sep7.204054.8470@hellgate.utah.edu> brian%jaguar.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Brian Sturgill) writes:
>
>>For some reason Unix people (and I was one) always seem to grossly
>>over estimate how many systems run it.  All Unix systems on all machines
>>ever delivered (whether it is still in use or not) is well under
>>10 million. (DOS I believe has an installed base of around 80 million.)
>
>Hmm, I'm not going to try to promote any personal agenda here, but I
>would like to point out one major difference.  Unix is a multi-user
>system.  Each of those copies of Unix probably represents several users.
>For example, Netcom here has over 2000 entries in /etc/passwd.  :-)

NT is a multiuser system... it is true that it doesn't support dumb
terminals... but at 2,000 a set who cares?  You're aware that several
X terminal vendors are headed for NT?

>
>If Netcom were a typical system (it's not), we could extrapolate 2
>billion Unix users vs. 80 million DOS users.  <grin>
>
>But even if we assume that the average Unix system has 8 users (not too
>unreasonable, I don't think), then Unix still matches DOS in userbase.

Why do you assume that each of the 80 million copies of DOS is used
by only one user?

>
>And then there's systems like Linux.  You think anyone is counting the
>number of Linux or 386BSD installations?  I doubt it.  It's probably not
>statistically significant, but there's no way of knowing...

If this survives AT&T's lawsuit against Berkeley and BSDI, then it
might become significant... at the moment, Berkeley Unix has less than
2% of the Unix market.  BSDI and Linux are still far smaller.

>
>>UNIX is so far behind NT in its features, it's not funny.
>[ except NeXTStep ]
>
>Of course, this brings up once again the issue of proprietary vs. non,
>and portable vs. non (I know that NT claims to be portable, but *I*
>don't have the source code to the OS--I can't port it).  :-)

Hmmmm.... name one "open" Unix vendor (not BSDI, somebody big) and how it is
that they are open, and you might just drag me into this mad-man's debate.

BTW, At the San Francisco Developer's conference Microsoft promised
that they would make NT's source code a available for research purposes
at academic institutions.  Nobody really believed them, but you never
know!!!  Oh... BTW... can academic institutions get OS/2 source code?

>
>If the features that NT has are useful, you can *bet* that a lot of Unix
>systems will adopt them.  I'm sure that Sun is keeping at least one
>beady little eye on the NT feature list....
(Yes, while sitting under their desk wimpering no doubt!)

It was funny, at the summer USENIX this year, I heard as much about NT
as I did Unix (from the attendees, not the papers of course, though
the papaers mentioned NT several times too.)

>
>>>If you want a powerful OS for a moderately sized personal system,
>>>forget about NT and buy OS/2.  If you want a powerful, fully-capable
>>>OS for high-end personal systems, servers, and their ilk, forget about
>>>NT again and buy UNIX.
>
>>You want to pay more for less???
>
>There are other issues than cost.  Reliability, openness, multi-vendor
>support, existing apps, software availability, number of knowledgable
>programmers/gurus.  I don't doubt that NT is a good system, and will
>have good support, but Unix has been around a long time, and is
>continuing to grow and improve.  I'll believe that NT is a Unix-killer
>when Unix finally dies.  :-)

Unix is reliable?  From whom?  Openess... from whom (other than BSDI)
can I, as a private individual, get source code?  Existing apps...
UNIX? (ahem... yeah, right.)  So far porting Unix apps to NT is not
all that hard.  It will be even easier once the POSIX.1 stuff gets there.
There are more DOS guru's than Unix ones.

>
>There's also issues like Postscript vs. Truetype.  Postscript is a
>widely used standard on a huge number of different platforms (the NeXT
>uses it internally for almost everything, for example), yet MS is trying
>to promote their own system... :-\

I think you're confused... TrueType belongs to a collalition... much
like the famed Open Software Foundation... it came about because
Adobe started being decidedly proprietary about Postscript.
I thought you said you supported open systems?  Oh... printers don't count?

>-- 
>Chris Waters    | the insane don't | NOBODY for President!
>xtifr@netcom.COM| need disclaimers | Because Nobody's perfect!!


Brian
-- 
C. Brian Sturgill                       *** OS/2 2.0 is for YOU! ***
University of Utah                  Microsoft needs some competition, but
Center for Software Science        -I- want to be one of the many using NT.
brian@cs.utah.edu; CIS: 70363,1373           :-) :-) :-)