From: wayne@backbone.uucp (Wayne Schlitt)
Subject: Re: HP and windows NT
Organization: The Backbone Cabal
	<1992Sep21.145845.26685@qcinet.Gwinnett.COM>
	<0ejrZH_00Uh_Q60FsZ@andrew.cmu.edu>
	<1992Sep23.212918.13562@qcinet.Gwinnett.COM> <yv9n1-=.mbk@netcom.com>
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 1992 15:51:48 GMT

In article <yv9n1-=.mbk@netcom.com> mbk@netcom.com (Miles Kehoe) writes:
> 
> I'll close with a quote I heard back in the mid-80s... back when
> people were first saying that 'unix was about to catch on BIG - 
> the quote, with apologies to its original author, is:
> 
> "By Tuesday of any given week, IBM will ship more DOS based PCs
> than ALL the Unix systems EVER installed in the world."
> 
> I wouldn't be surprised if you could replace "DOS based" with
> "Windows 3.x based" and still be right even today. 
> 

well, I hate to be the one to surprise you, but I am sure that neither
of the above statements are true anymore and depending on how you
count things, I am not sure if they were ever true.


Sun claims an install base of 500,000 SPARC based unix systems.  They
have sold many more unix systems, but obviously not all of them are
still in use or they are non-SPARC based.  SCO says that they have a
similar number of installed systems, and when you add in the systems
from HP, IBM, DEC, NCR, AT&T, Apple, Cray, Convex, SGI, MIPS, etc, you
will find that there are about as many installed unix systems as there
are pc's shipped by everyone in a year.

Ok, it is still true that there are many more installed MS-DOS boxes
than all of the unix boxes combined and that the unix boxes are split
among too many non-binary compatible systems.  This would lead you to
believe that the unix market is still too "small" to worry about.


Unfortunately, you have to look at two other numbers:

   How many people use unix?
   and
   How much money is spent for unix systems?

Remember that MS-DOS is a single user system, so when several million
are sold in a year, they are "only" going to several million people.
When one Cray is sold, it tends to be used by dozens, if not several
hundred people.  Also, the amount of money brought in by HP when it
sells a HP9000/877 is equivalent to a couple hundred pc's.  If you
want a real kick, look at the amount of cpu power shipped: Unix wins
by a big margin.

When businesses are looking at a market, they tend to look at how much
money they can make in a market.  Right now, the MS-DOS market is
"only" about 2-3 times the size of the Unix market and the margins are
_much_ lower and it is much harder to get any credit for building in
quality or support.


Unix has already made it "big time".  It is dominate in the academic,
research and engineering fields.  It is moving into the mini's with a
vengeance and the government is requiring it on more and more bids.  It
is even starting to fight it's way into the mainframe market.  


Unix isn't ideal for most of these markets.  The supercomputer people
say that it isn't efficient enough, the mainframe people say that
there isn't enough transaction processing, batch processing and
database support.  The desktop people say that it uses way to many
resources, it is hard to use and it doesn't have enough applications.
If you add everything that the mainframe people want, it will just
make Unix larger.  If you change it so that it is easier to use, you
loose a lot of the advantages of having the same "unix" everywhere.  


Still, the question isn't whether Unix will die.  That is not very
likely at all.  The question is will it become the single dominate
operating system from the desktop to the mainframe.  Unix hasn't won
the desktop yet.  It might not win it for several years, but if it
ever does it will be _very_ hard to replace.



-wayne
From: bruno@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM (Bruno Melli)
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 17:51:39 GMT
Subject: Re: dbx for HP-UX??
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA