Is System V going down the tube?

[tut at ucbopal.CC.Berkeley.ARPA]

According to an advertisement for SCO in the latest "Unix Review",
Xenix constitutes almost 80% of installed Unix systems on micros.
I didn't believe it at first.  But in a recent issue of "The Yates
Perspective" (a marketing newsletter), there was a pie chart of
installed Unix systems, broken down as follows:

	Xenix		77%
	Version 7	20%
	System III	 3%	(System V must be 0%)

The funny thing was that another pie chart showed that 23% of the
vendors sell System III, thus chasing 3% of the market!  Frankly,
this shocked me.  Up till now I've believed AT&T's propaganda that
System V will become the standard Unix-- an indication, I thought,
that the market can't make informed technical decisions.  Maybe the
market is smarter than I thought.

What does System V have that Version 7 doesn't have, besides termcap
and vi (which have been in Xenix for a long time)?  Shared memory?
(big deal).  An incompatible terminal driver?  An incompatible init?
A few incompatible library routines?  The cut and paste programs?

Remember that Xenix is Version 7 based, with Berkeley enhancements,
and System III compatibility.  Thus, 97% of Unix micros are running
Version 7.  The IBM PC/AT has been announced with Xenix, and although
I've heard rumors that Interactive's (System III based) PC/IX will be
available for it, this hasn't been stated in any IBM advertising.

If I were writing piece of commercial software, I would make damn sure
it ran on the PC/AT under Xenix, and I would strive to eliminate all
System V dependencies in the code!

Bill Tuthill
(as a private citizen)