From: mcastle@mcs213d.cs.umr.edu (Michael R Castle)
Subject: Re: PowerPC or (P5 & P6)?
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 15:44:30 GMT
Organization: University of Missouri - Rolla

In article <1992Sep30.180028.13061@phillip.edu.au> t9014201@phillip.edu.au writes:
>I get the impression that the future of Operating Systems is in them being
>designed to be Hardware independent.  

Very TRUE!

>NT has the Kernel concept - You don't totally rewrite the OS for a different
>Chip,  just the comparitively small Kernel.
>I think this will be the true power of NT.  It will allow the user and
>manufacturer to have more freedom choosing their hardware.  The "tyranny" of
>8086 dependence will be broken.  NT will run on DECs Alpha chips and others.
>Will Pink ONLY run on PowerPC chips?  If so, then thats a shame.

Pink will probably run on any 'decent' platform (read 32-bit and up).
>Oh yeah, I USE OS/2 and I love it,  but i think it will die in the long run 
>if its limited to only 8086 machines.

Huh?  From what I understand (and I may be misinformed here), is that os/2 2.0
was designed to run on multiple platforms.  Just try to find ANY machine 
specific commands documented in c-set/2.  It's a tad difficult.  Can't even 
generate a hardware interrupt.

The problem will be getting users to switch over to a 'better' platform when
they have tons of binaries that will only run on a certain machine.  Joe User
will ask, "Will this new PowerPC run my WordStar editor?"

Through emulation, yes.  Won't that be slow.  Not for an interactive
environment like an editor.  Well, I don't know, I think I'll stick with an
intel based machine....

Will all versions of os/2 (or nt) support dos?  Will all versions of os/2 and
nt supports dos on ALL platforms??  

Of course, people are going to start complaining when an os/2 program will run
on one machine that has os/2, but won't run on another machine that also has
os/2 because it's a different processor.

Unix aware people are used to this, but there is a large installed base out 
there who are not going to want to have to go through the trouble of either 
purchasing separate versions of programs to run on different machines 
(assuming upgrading machines here, not pirating)  or maintaining 10,000
different exectuables of which they may at any time, only use 2 or 3.

As a result, people will tend to stick with the major 2 processors: 80x86 
and 68xxx.  If intel ever really does drop 8086 support, it will just
shoot itself in the foot.  Sure, it adds unwanted complexity to the chip,
but users only want one binary (for better or worse).  Now, it's quite possible
that I am severly underestimating the sophistication of the end users wrt 
dealing with multiplatforms, but probably not their laziness.  If you have
20 apps that run on an intel machine, and you want to move up in the world,
would you buy a machine based on another chip, and have to get new binaries
from 20 different software houses, or buy another intel machine that will run
what you already have??

What will the average user's continue to use??  Intel based machines.  What
operating systems?? Hard telling.  DOS, some.  OS/2 and NT most likely (I 
suspect these 2 will be a lot closer to each other than people think, and 
I would not be suprised if utilities appeared that would let you 'modify'
executable made for one os to run on the other....)

Of course, when I saw micro$oft come out with their p-code, I wondered if p
really stood for packed, or were they thinking, portability???  Makes you
wonder.

Anyway, my money will still be on intel, unless they manage to do something
really extremely stupid.

mrc
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.advocacy