Organization: University of Maine System
Date: Tuesday, 8 Sep 1992 08:48:11 EDT
From: Andrew T. Robinson <ANDY@MAINE.MAINE.EDU>
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: Microsoft bashing (Well, not exactly....)
 <92251.212003ANDY@MAINE.MAINE.EDU> <1992Sep7.204054.8470@hellgate.utah.edu>

From: brian%jaguar.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Brian Sturgill)
>Why aren't you in a Unix advocacy group....
>How dare you post this in the _NT_ advocacy group!  :-)
>
  I'm not a UNIX advocate--I'm a VM/ESA advocate!

>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.)
>As a matter of fact Unix's installed base is much less than that of the
>Macintosh which has an installed base that is less than 10 million.
>
  That's why I put a "?" after the numbers.  First, I'm not a "unix people",
  and secondly while the installed base may be in the hundreds of thousands,
  many of those systems are midrange installations which can have thousands
  of users--hundreds simultaneously.  Finally, while I believe your figures
  I've never seen them before and they contradict what I see in the academic
  community where people continue to move away from personal systems to
  things like Suns, RS600s, etc.

>UNIX is so far behind NT in its features, it's not funny.
>Just take a look at the OS/2 vs NT list I send out... do you know
>of any Unix that even comes close? (Except NextStep...  we've been
>over this before in this group... where were you?)
>
  I wasn't here, obviously :-).  As I'm not a UNIX person I can't
  run off a list, but not many things you listed in the NT feature list
  are alien to UNIX.  I could be wrong, but I believe Mach was designed
  for symmetric multiprocessing.  AIX has TCF, which allows you to
  migrate running processes to an entirely different architecture (I've
  done this between a PS/2 and a 9370.).  Granted the feature support
  is fragmented across versions of UNIX, but those features which are
  really essential *do* tend to become standardized (let's not launch
  into a portability fight now--I'm not familiar enough with the innards
  of different UNIX systems to complete the argument).

  This brings up another point.  You talk about NT being so much better
  that OS/2, but on substantive features this doesn't play out.  You seem
  to be admiring NT from an internals view, but internals are hardly
  relevant to the non-programming user and they are changing all the time.
  I'm not going to dissect your feature list point-for-point here, but
  a good portion of what "NT has that OS/2 doesn't" is academic.

  BTW, I agree that NT sounds (maybe looks) like a better OS than OS/2,
  but past a certain point "better" becomes meaningless--like the difference
  between cache sizes past the 99% hit threshold :-).  I've seen nothing
  that convinces me that NT has any major practical advantages--indeed,
  the DOS support provided by OS/2 over-rides a good number of technical
  wins in NT :-)

>You want to pay more for less???
>
  I have to disagree with you.  UNIX gives you more for less.  It generally
  comes bundled with various higher-end machines, and the BSD UNIX costs a
  lot less than the projected cost of NT :-)

>You want to buy a fat slow half/GUI with even less apps than OS/2?
>
  I can't argue about this because I don't have good comparisons of
  GUIs on similar platforms.  I do know that (As you said previously)
  there is a dearth of "shrink wrapped" applications for UNIX--but no
  lack of applications in general.

>Pretentious!... to even think that Unix is currently at as high a class as
>NT is pretentious.
>
  You're right--UNIX is a much higher class of OS than NT :-).  Seriously,
  I think your "objectivist" mask is wearing thin here.  Like everyone else,
  your evaluations selectively favor the features that are important to you
  and not necessarily those which make a better OS.  Nothing wrong with that!

Andy  (alt.devil.advocacy)