From: mjo@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Mike O'Connor)
Subject: Re: OSF/1 vs SVR4 (and others)
X-Disclaimer: Not an official spokesperson for Ford Motor Co.
Reply-To: Mike O'Connor <mjo@fmsrl7.srl.ford.com>
Organization: "Fordz"
Date: Sun, 12 Apr 1992 13:30:31 GMT

In article <1992Apr10.193647.5528@news.larc.nasa.gov>
mln@sunkj.larc.nasa.gov (Michael Nelson) writes:

:original DEC info from: evans@zk3.dec.com (Marc Evans)

The chart below clearly sounds like a sales pitch from DEC.  Since
their OSF/1 isn't mainstream production, this makes the table look a
bit skewed.  (In particular, I'd love to see the apps available for
DEC's OSF :).)  HP has an OSF product as well, but available only to
developers-who-absolutely-gotta-haveit and certainly not a real
"product" yet.  Let's see some of the statistics for Ultrix 4.2(a,b,c
-- whatever voodoo games they're playing with numbering).

:Vendor                          DEC     SUN     HP      IBM     USL
:OS                              OSF/1   Solaris HP-UX   AIX     Sys V
:Version                         1.0     1.0     8.0     3.1     4

AIX is up to 3.2, which has added functionality.  Also, did "Display
PostScript" or the like appear on here (since I'm thinking IBM)?

:Available                       now     now     now     now     now
:OS
:  Kernel base                   OSF/1   BSD     BSD     AIX     SVR4

Why not just say "Mach" for OSF/1?  :)

:  shared libraries              yes     yes     yes     yes     yes

What about Ultrix?  Don't you all just LOVE MIPS executable sizes for
X stuff?  Here a meg, there a meg, everywhere a meg meg...

For that matter, is there a migration plan in place to have current
users using non-OSF/1 move toward OSF/1 gracefully?  HP's declared
intent is to get all their PA-RISC people moving toward OSF/1 with
continued revs to HP-UX, and offer hardware upgrades to people stuck
with 68000-series equipment.  The last part in particular "disturbs" a
number of people (read comp.sys.apollo -- heh!) and probably isn't the
greatest approach, but at least there's something going on.  I don't
see anything similar going on in the DEC universe.  Heck, with the
buyout of MIPS by SGI and the Alpha development and all the VAXen out
there, you have to wonder about architecture support.

:Other
:  Runs DOS & windows apps       3rd     yes     ?       ?       some    2 3

HP and Sun have SoftPC, and AIX on the RS/6000 has PCSim, but the
emulation is only that of an 80286.  Thus, the best that I would say
about Microsft Windows 3.0/1 apps is that none of them can run all of
them, 'cept for an Intel SysV.4 box if you can boot off a DOS
partition.  A 20+ MIPS 486/50Mhz that can run both SysV.4 and DOS apps
and has a large base of technical and hardware support could be
considered more "open" than anything OSF has floating around.

:  SNA support                   yes     yes     ?       ?       3rd (?) 2

C'mon...  IBM with a "?" on SNA support?  :)

						...Mike


-- 
 Mike O'Connor                     |  Ford Motor Company, USA
 Applications Systems Analyst      |  CPD P&MS ECC Core Software
 Phone #:  +1 (313) 390-4008       |  P.O. Box 2053, ECC MD-7
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