From: hallam@zeus02.desy.de (Phill Hallam-Baker)
Subject: Re: X Under Windows NT
Reply-To: Hallam@zeus02.desy.de
Organization: Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron, Experiment ZEUS bei HERA
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 23:30:35 GMT

In article <BvtKvK.3I2@mtholyoke.edu>, jbotz@mtholyoke.edu (Jurgen Botz)
writes:

|>In article <1992Oct8.153030.2160@decuac.dec.com> mjr@hussar.dco.dec.com
|>(Marcus J. "Buddy can you spare a clue?" Ranum) writes:
|>>	Laughing off NT because it doesn't solve the scientific community's
|>>problems is an echo of all the hard-core VMSers who laughed off UNIX because
|>>it wasn't "commercial quality". Don't make the mistake of evaluating NT in
|>>terms of functionality. Evaluate it in terms of demographics.
|>
|>I wouldn't make the mistake of underestimating WNT's importance or MS's
|>muscle, but on the other hand, when you _do_ look at the demographics of
|>the situation, you see millions of PCs with not enough memory or disk space
|>to even think about running WNT.  Who is MS targeting?  According to their
|>hype, the "power users".  Who are the power users?  Well, the scientific
|>community is a very important sector of what the marketeers call "power
|>users."

Gosh a flame war! Fun Fun Fun! Gee this is almost as good as the Prezy debates!


Reading the Byte article on WNT it is obvious that Cutler has done a good job on
it. The argument "it can't be as good as twenty year old UNIX" is a fraud. WNT
has obviously had much more development work go into the fundamentals than went
into the whole of UNIX. Besides it is largely a rip off of VMS when all is said
and done and that is as old as UNIX. Point is that like VMW WNT is coherent,
there will be none of the stupid kludges like shadow passwords and network file
systems that don't match the native file system that UNIX suffers from.

As far as the windows aspect goes I very much doubt that it is impossible to
prize off the Windows interface and replace it with X. Except that that is *not*
what you want to do!

To explain:-

The main difficulties of X are that the code is all single threaded and that the
transfer protocol is at a low level, Instead of moving a "select from this menu"
message across the net to get back a selection we have to ship oodles of expose,
keypress, etc etc routines.

Looking at the threads part of WNT it looks like we can use WNT as a genuine
base for object oriented code, not C++ garbage imitations. Point is we can
expect that WNT applications will not suffer the lock ups and halts that
characterize the X windows environment - we should not have to wait for ten
minutes for the terminal window to scroll through some messages just because the
mail program is opening a new window.

Point is you could add X on top but it would be *very* tricky to use the MIT
code, if the kernel is using the window system to output messages then a single
threaded window interface could cause deadlocks to occur.

What we really need is some way of getting the WNT server to accept X protocols
and then we can use all our existing client side interface libraries etc. Just
think of the server as you would a graphics processor. The motif window manager
and it's ilk would not be much use but something could go in it's place.

The fact that WNT is a single vendor product should not be too worrying. Just as
the IBM pc was originaly a single vendor it is still possible to make clones -
or rather interoperable systems. Those systems that fail to offer the
capabilities that WNT offer will simply get stomped on :-) RIP MVS, UNIX and
good riddence. On the other hand DEC have obviously got some gameplan going in
allowing Cuttler loose in the first place. I would guess that VMS will be
offering interoperability at a fairly high level within a short time. If DEC
start offering VMS on multiple platforms they could possibly end up with a large
slice of the market that Microsoft have opened up for them. Another possibility
would be to take the MACH kernel and add some interprocess synchronization
primitives into it (ie not toy town ones via the file system) and interface it
to a modern file system.

I don't see that Microsoft ramming a good operating system down our throats is
any worse than AT&T ramming a crap one down our throats all these years.

--

Phill Hallam-Baker