Interactive and me - An open letter to ISC.

[Peter da Silva]

In article <62 at maxx.UUCP> tyager at maxx.UUCP (Tom Yager) writes:
> Some of the anonymous FTP sites out there are running on DOS systems. Yes,
> you have to give them over to it. But how else could you set up such an
> arrangement for around $1000?

I guess it depends on whether such an arrangement is considered adequate.
Even if just a pure server is what you want, the disk drives are going to
be the dominant cost, so why not spring for an extra grand or so and get a
compute server as well?

> Some vendors do this better than others, but the best of the
> LANS bring to bear all of the power of a UNIX network except remote-execution
> capability.

And multiuser protection, and soft recovery from program failures, and...

> > > Can I run AmigaOS or Mac System 7 on other vendors' hardware?

> > Since OS/2 is restricted to one hardware platform this is pretty much
> > irrelevant, but you can run Windows, GEM, and Mac/OS on an Amiga.

> Using your example, I can also run OS/2 on that same Amiga with a 286
> Bridgecard. Does that make it as "portable" as the others?

You missed the point... none of them is portable. They are all proprietary
operating systems running on a single CPU family. When you can run OS/2 on
everything from a PC/XT to a Cray come tell me. Right now it fails at both
ends.
-- 
Peter da Silva.   `-_-'
+1 713 274 5180.
<peter at ficc.ferranti.com>