Future at Berzerkeley

[Carl Rigney]

This has no business in Unix Wizards, so I editted that out.

In article <28955 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:

[Why people will still be interested in BSD after System V becomes "standard"]

I agree with many of the points Barry makes, but I'd like to add a word
from a System Administrator working at a Fortune 500, $1 billion
company - Advanced Micro Devices.  Except for our large installed base
of Mentor (Apollo) CAD workstations, the vast majority of our computers
run some flavor of BSD (counting SunOS).  And it's our intention to
continue running BSD-compatible systems into the future.  If some
vendor has a System V that looks exactly like 4.3BSD, that's OK.  But
to follow the herd just because some marketing person at AT&T keeps
shouting loudly "We're the standard!  We're the standard!" strikes me
as useless.

We choose the best hardware to accomplish our mission, and so far that
hardware runs 4.3 ports.  We try to follow (although not nearly as
closely as I wish I had time for) current research in distributed computing.
We're looking into ISIS, and as other distributed systems appear we'll
look into them, because every night a thousand mips of CPU power are idling
for lack of software to use them effectively.  In Chip Design, CPU Power
translates directly into better product designs and faster time to market -
there's no limit to how much CPU power we could use if we could get it,
but there is a limit to our resources, so by staying near the front of the
pack instead of using 5-year old technology & software, we get a very real
boost to our bottom line, intangible as it may be to quantify.

I don't want to see this degenerate into another System V vs. 4.3 argument,
but I just thought I'd express a few reasons for why BSD is far from
disappearing in the business place.

	--Carl Rigney
	cdr at amdcad.AMD.COM
	{ames decwrl gatech pyramid sun uunet}!amdcad!cdr
	408-749-2453

Disclaimer:  I'm not an official spokesperson for AMD.  (I am, however,
currently evaluating various computers for a major purchase, and it
*will* be running a 4.3-based OS.)