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To: K. M. Strickler who wrote (73715)	10/22/1998 7:04:00 AM
From: Byron Xiao	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

K.M. You know, out of many arguments on UNIX vs. NT, this might be the best one. Money will determine the outcome. The question is: will simply throwing enough money be enough for NT to beat out UNIX? Let's look at where these two brands of OS stand now: In 1970's, Dennis Ritchie has already envisioned what a "real" OS should look like: multi-tasking, interrupt-driven preemptive kernel. In 1970's, Berkeley took ahold of the source code from Bell Lab and added network support to it. SUNW took it one step further and developed the NFS file system, since then, UNIX has been enhanced to run on SMP processors. A great deal of studies also have been done on load balancing on a large clusters of UNIX systems. The beauty of UNIX also lies in the development facilities it offers: make and revision control are the two biggest and best tools ever developed for software engineers besides the concept of compilers. You also have vi, awk, sed, yacc, lex and a rich set of UNIX commands available. At this point, for us UNIX developers, this integration of software development environment isn't just merely tools to do our job, it's becoming a religion. That's why you see enthusaists like T. Linus developed Linux on his own time. There is already an ISO standard for standard UNIX interface: what the kernel should behave, what set of system calls UNIX should provide, what shell commands it should provide. The beauty of UNIX is everything is so well defined, that's why you see so many different implementations of UNIX exist but they all conform to the same standard and it's easily portable to different hardware architecture. On the other hand, NT is all proprietory to MSFT. Nobody is implementing a different version of NT. Multitasking, Clustering is all so new to NT. I interviewed for a NT cluster job in DEC last year, so many concepts that were 70's 80's technology for UNIX are new to NT. Up till last year, NT was still a single session system: only one user is allowed to use the system consoles/terminals. UNIX has provided the concepts of pseudo terminals in the 70's! My buddy worked for the NT clustering product: Wolfpack. He told me that it was so hard to scale that he wasn't sure if it's feasible to provide the same kind of clustering support for the next 64 bit version of NT! Spending enough money will solve the problem? They can spend enough money to re-write the code, but spend enough money on an already crappy design is running the risk of wasting plenty of money. UNIX will be around, there just so many religious users/developers for them. Don't get me wrong, I own MSFT, DELL stocks (SUNW stocks as well). I see a world where they can co-exist. I am just doubtful that NT will be scalable enough to take out the whole spectrum of low end to high end market. <May I be the first to tell you that NT will replace UNIX! Why? Because MSFT will throw enough resource at the problem to make it happen! The supporters of UNIX cannot or will not get together enough expertise (read that MONEY) to counter the amount that MSFT can put on the problem!>

To: K. M. Strickler who wrote (73715)	10/22/1998 8:01:00 AM
From: Robert Scott Diver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Ken, IBM's MVS (OS/390) has been UNIX certified for several years now. It is scalable NOW and has been for a long time. It runs on medium to VERY large systems. 1- Does IBM have enough money to keep an existing product better than MSFT's wannabe ware? 2- If NT will be scalable when it needs to be and it needs to be scalable now, why isn't it scalable now? 3- If WINTEL is taking over the world, how did IBM and SUNW manage to report improved earnings? Scott