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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chris McConnel who wrote (22632)	3/19/1998 11:12:00 PM
From: paul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Unix is Open in the sense that most commercial versions of Unix are based on software in the public domain - Sun, IBM, HP, SCO all sell modified versions of Unix but they are not very different - for example Oracle ports their database software to dozens of variations of Unix with relative ease - Unix was the first major shift to OS based platforms - i.e Write to an OS vs. write to a HW Platform like VMS, MVS, etc. NT on the other hand is closed and controlled by one Company - Microsoft - it is based on Microsoft's hidden API's and agenda to dominate the software industry via a monopoly which is becoming well understood by the public. It didnt work for IBM and it wont work for Microsoft - question is will Compaq show some backbone and seek a path as a technology vendor rather than a Microsoft reseller furthering only Microsoft's goals.

To: Chris McConnel who wrote (22632)	3/19/1998 11:33:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Sun has moved upscale to challenge HP as the 'real' enterprise Unix vendor. Their introduction earlier this year of the 10000 line marked a real change in Sun's capability. Solaris is a clean descendant of the 'berkley' Unix kernel and as such has a very loyal following and a lot of people who understand the inner workings of the OS. Solaris (as well as HP-UX and DEC Unix) have a record of reliability and enterprise capability which NT will not have for a while. This is not just perception - of the operating systems in wide use, only VAX VMS has a better reputation for reliability, and it only runs on VAX so its days are numbered. CPQ will soon own both DEC Unix and VMS (written by Dave Cutler, the same guy who wrote NT). Unix and VMS are 20 years old, a lot of programmers have had a lot of time to work out the bugs. NT is a relative youngster at 5 years. I would be very surprised if CPQ did not move to support both VMS and DEC Unix. VMS has a large and loyal high end customer base, and NT is a natural path for them in the future since it has a lot of architectural similarities. DEC Unix is based on the Mach kernel, which is a more modern implementation but does not have the same avid following as the original AT&T kernel or the berkley (BSD) kernel. DEC was pretty successful in keeping MS support but did not really push Unix very hard. It will be interesting to see how CPQ manages to do the balancing act with Microsoft.