From: lithgow@uslp.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: OS's and what they run on (Was Re: Personal Computer World)
Date: 10 Apr 92 00:28:13 GMT

[In message "Re: Personal Computer World", Neil Postlethwaite writes:]
> OS/2 has just being launched I think and is supposed
>to be fairly good (last Byte preview was positive).

The journalism of Byte magazine is at least as suspect as that of PCW.
Byte has progressively been getting worse and worse over the last decade,
and is now at the level of one decent article per three months. Their
bias towards DOS/Windows/OS/2, or anything IBM PC related (or even just
American) is ridiculous and very pronounced. A good review of OS/2 2.0 in
Byte means nothing.

>	Though like OS/2, Win-NT, Finder, AmigaDOS, RISCOS all have the
>scalability problem. You can only push RISCOS to an A540, Windows to a
>486/50, Finder to a Quadra 900. Unix (the way forward IMHO) doesn't suffer
>from this. Unix goes from a PC, through power PC, R2xx, Sun, HP, IBM, DEC
>all the was to mainframes. That's why PC OS's can only be pushed so far.

This may sound strange coming from someone working at where I work,
please refer to the disclaimer, though.

UNIX is a good example of a portable OS, right? UNIX is scalable, right?
Do these abilities give it any disadvantages over other OS's? You bet!

On every platform I am aware of, UNIX requires more resources, and
delivers less performance and usability in the target market, than that
platform's native OS(s) do. Examples are: Acorn Archimedes, Apple
Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, IBM PC, DEC VAX (all models, including
MicroVax's which are basically workstations), HP-3000, IBM Minis (ie
AS/400 etc.), IBM Mainframes (and clones), etc. (I'm not sure of, say,
ICL Mainframes, though I would be amazed if they reversed the trend.)

Now you could say that this is because of poor ports of UNIX, but if so,
why are all of the ports poor? They are not, it is just that a portable
OS won't be able to take advantage of special hardware features in the
same way that a proprietary OS can. Simple.

For the coup de grace (I think that's right :->), just look at what the
originators of UNIX are currently doing (ie. Plan-9 at Bell Lab's).
Plan-9 applies different, communicating OS's to each different type of
box, one OS for terminals, one for CPU servers, and one for file servers.
This gets much better performance than having UNIX on a desktop machine,
networked to a file server running UNIX.

>My next computer will be a Unix/X based box.

Why? UNIX provides no advantages, and X is even worse. It does not
provide portability of applications, except at a source level, and
proprietary OS's are providing this at the almost the same level as the
many UNIX's now, and still giving their benifits. Even the Arch, with
UnixLib, provides a (rather small) measure of POSIX.1 compliance.
Furthermore, the UNIX environment is superior only for programming, and
only superior to some OS's (I prefer RISC OS to UNIX, even for
programming, now that I have all the juicy UNIX tools).

I wish people would stop dribbling about UNIX (and DOS, and WINDOWS, and
OS/2, all of which are inferior OS's, why not rave about RISC OS, Mac OS,
MPE, VMS, etc.?)

> If you want a good read get Byte.

Ha ha.


- Malcolm.
lithgow@usl.com
These are my opinions, obviously not those of my company (just lucky I
don't work in the sales department, eh?)
UNIX is a registered trademark of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.