UNIX Expo in NYC

[Chris Calabrese[rs]]

O.K. World, I went to the opening of UNIX Expo in NYC
yesterday, and here are some of my impressions:


Hottest Topic:

Window Warz was certainly the hottest topic of debate at the show.
The big question was when OSF was going to announce what
window system it would support and what it would be.
Next in line after that was if anyone would pay attention once they
did decide.  With IBM going off with NeXT, Microsoft and HP
firmly committed to Presentation Manager, and Dec behind DecWindows,
who knows?

The general theory is that OSF will chose DecWindows, but how can they
call themselves open if their window system is called DECwindows?

The company which seemed to be most committed to an "industry
standard" user interface was Sun, though there was also strong
support from the university players for this sort of thing.
Bill Joy actually went so far as suggesting that DecWindows was a
very good piece of software with which a better UI could be implemented.

The "open" quote of the day goes to Andrew Palay of the CMU Andrew project 
(referring to all the fact that most of the toolkits around are independant
of the actual Look and Feel) "pick one [Look and Feel] and we'll support it"
Also hats off to Paul Asente of Dec for giving an entire presentation
of his window manager/toolkit work without once plugging the UI side of
DecWindows (I guess he aggreed with Bill Joy).

Personally, my view is this:  what the industry needs to rally
behind is one single Look and Feel.  This does not mean one
toolkit.  Of all the specifications around, OPEN LOOK is the most
thought out for usability, short learning curve, power, and toolkit
independance.  The industry should adopt OPEN LOOK, and Sun can
offer it under NeWS, AT&T can offer it under Xtlib OPEN LOOK Plus
(or whatever they're calling it this week), Dec can offer it under
DecWindows, CMU can offer it under Andrew, and IBM, Apple,
Microsoft, and HP can keep talking about why users find their propriety
window systems easier to deal with when coming from a DOS/OS|2/MAC
environment.


The Hottest Hardware:

My two favorites were the Toshiba T5100 portable '386, and Sony's
magneto/optical disk (don't tell the people at NeXT about this).
There wasn't any one thing which impressed me about the Toshiba,
but damn that sucker is small!  As for the Sony...no, it's not
based on the NeXT/Cannon engine, it's totaly Sony...it's available
commercially in Japan and soon in the States...it has a 90ms avg
seek time...it looks like any other SCCSI disk to the host
machine...it holds 325mb/side (manual flip)...it costs $4600...it's hot!!!


Hottest Software:

I didn't see a _whole_ lot of really impressive applications (continual
pushing of last year's window managers [except for Sun and AT&T which
actually had this year's versions of OPEN LOOK running],
lots of hardware, and lots of 5 year old extensions to 10 year
old operating systems (wow, now you can get _full_ sVr0 with one or
two 4.2 networking extensions as an option when you convert to the
new XYZ operating system).  What I did see that was hot was the
latest version of ART by Inference Corperation. To quote the
literature,
	ART, the Automated Reasoning Tool, is a complete and
	integrated tool for building expert systems.  The breadth
	and depth of ART features, fully integrated in a coherent
	design for the commercial marketplace, make it the most
	powerful and efficient tool available...

	ART is the only fully data-directed, hybred expert system
	tool on the market, which means that expert systems built
	in ART:
	o Are expandable without sacrificing speed.
	o Operate asynchronously so that they can be used in real
	  time for high throughput decision support.
	o Are easier less expensive to maintain.
I'm not an AI person, but it did look like a nice toy.


OSF:

OSF big cheese Henry Crouse gave the Expo's keynote address
concerning the "vision" of the OSF.  As one would expect, his talk
featured the usual array of information on the "open ideal", and
the usual lack of any actual implementation of OSF level 0.
I think the idea of an "open software" consortium is wonderful.
I think the people at OSF (not the members of OSF) believe that
they are doing the right thing.  I think the member companies
are too intrenched in propriety technology (or lack of technology)
to actually go along with any of OSF's better decisions.


Biggest Display:

IBM's oodles of mainframes in the middle of the
show was shure impressive, but were they really doing anyghing
beside making _all_those_ps2's look good by doing all their
number crunching?


Biggest "We're compatible with", "See our display with", or "We're
a VAR for" company:

AT&T..._all_ the small exibitors had a death-star somewhere in
their display, and many were running their applications on AT&T
micros.


Workstation/graphics terminal hooked up as the front end to the
most big systems:

Sun 3...Amdahl, Prime, Pyrimid, and even the show itself were
running Sun 3's.
-- 
	Christopher J. Calabrese
	AT&T Bell Laboratories
	att!ulysses!cjc		cjc at ulysses.att.com