Splinter Unix?

[John Sloan]

in article <3173 at pdn.UUCP>, reggie at pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach) says:
>     I think you have hit the nail on the head!  Those who develop on a UNIX
> based system right now will not be affected.  If I use DEC hardware and they
> will no longer support UNIX, then I'll move to something else that does.  What
> DEC and IBM are trying to do is stem the tide of people switching from their
> proprietary operating systems to UNIX by confussing them on the existence of
> a single UNIX standard.  IBM has even more to loose than DEC in the PC market
> where they want people to go with OS/2.

I must admit I'm a little confused as to the basic argument by the
Hamilton group as to AT&T/Sun having a competitive advantage because
Unix will be optimized for their equipment (or whoever markets a SPARC
based product).

I always thought there were two predominant Unix standards, System V and
BSD. I thought all BSD development was done on VAXen, hence all other
vendors other than DEC had to port BSD to their own machines. So DEC had
some competitive advantage because _if_ BSD was optimized to run on
_anything_, it must have been VAXen. I also seem to recall that AT&T
started distributing System V only for their 3Bx machines, so _if_
System V was optimized to run on _anything_, it must have been 3Bx
systems.

Yet I seem to see an awful lotta vendors porting System V and/or BSD to
their boxes, and instead of whining about competitive advantages, they
were happy that they didn't have to develop a proprietary operating from
scratch for their machine, something that would have been a major
investment.

I don't understand the difference here. Seems to me as long as the
firm hasn't fired their Unix people, and hasn't thrown away their
optimizing C compiler, then their main disadvantage is that they may
not be privvy to work under development. Were they before? If so, then
its a real issue, but its still something that can be negotiated. All
of this posturing is generating more heat than light, and it may just
accomplish what DEC and IBM may want: a weakening of the proponents for
Unix. It sure as heck is making my job harder. I want to buy machines
that run one version of Unix. If that means I don't buy from DEC and
IBM, that is unfortunate, but so be it.

-- 
John Sloan, The SPOTS Group    Wright State University Research Building
CSNET: jsloan at SPOTS.Wright.Edu  3171 Research Blvd., Kettering, OH 45420
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