UNIX standard

[Jim Barton]

From: jmb at patton.SGI.COM (Jim Barton)

In article <147 at longway.TIC.COM>:
> From: uunet!wlbr.eaton.com!etn-rad!jru (John Unekis)
> 
>    We recently had some SUN reps come to give a presentation about SPARC.
>    They were strongly suggesting that due to their relationship with AT&T
>    (that is AT&T will soon sell SPARC) it will soon be the case that if you
>    are not a SPARC machine you will not *really* be UNIX compatible. They
>    were talking about a coming binary standard, so that you could buy a
>    program written for UNIX and know that it would run on your UNIX machine
>    the same way you know that PC software will always run on your Intel/PC.
>    This binary standard would assumably be based on the SPARC instruction
>    set.
>    Is this stuff true or is it just marketing hype? Is UNIX really going to
>    become hardware dependent? What about all of us out here with our 680x0
>    or 80x86 or VAXen or whatever? Are we going to be second-class UNIX users,
>    unable to run the bulk of UNIX software? Can anybody out there clarify
>    this?
> 
>    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>    Any opinion expressed above is mine only. {ihnp4 or voder}!wlbr!etn-rad!jru
> 
> Volume-Number: Volume 13, Number 34

Before one bites too hard on this hype, you should remember that Sun will
soon be selling 80386 based boxes.  How can they sell said systems if
they aren't standard UNIX?  What about all those Sun-3's out there, do they
suddenly become useless to everybody?

You should also check out AT&T's side of the story, which is different
than Sun's.  As far as they are concerned, there will be a binary standard
for UNIX for every type of processor.  Thus, there will be a SPARC ABI,
but it will be just one out of the collection, including 386 ABI
(signed with Microsoft just last year), 68K ABI (signed with Motorola
very recently) and others on the way.

Sun would like to be the IBM of the workstation industry.  Backward technology,
marketing hype, trashing competitors and the like.  AT&T doesn't even claim
that SPARC is state-of-the-art, or best performance anymore either.  Just
that it is standard (Remember, what an "open standard" is by the new rules:
I design something I like, publish barely enough information for somebody
else to >expensively< duplicate it, and proclaim it a standard.  I don't
need your concurrence or opinions, nor do I wan't them.  After all, you
might have a better idea ...).

Finally, think about a sales organization that would send their salepeople
out with such a story.  You are obviously concerned by it, and see the 
flaws.  They trash their own current and future sales of 386 and 68K boxes
to scare you into buying SPARC boxes. 

Would you buy a computer from these people?

[ Ok, folks:  this is a technical newsgroup, for technical discussions.
It's hard to talk about standards without talking about politics, but
let's try to avoid casting aspersions on companies or people.  -mod ]

-- Jim Barton
Silicon Graphics Computing Systems    "UNIX: Live Free Or Die!"
jmb at sgi.sgi.com, sgi!jmb at decwrl.dec.com, ...{decwrl,sun}!sgi!jmb
--

Volume-Number: Volume 13, Number 37