"The Clouds Begin to Clear" (long)

[rohan kelley]

The American Bar Association has as one of its sections, a section on
economics of law practice.  Lawyers who have an interest in efficient
delivery of legal services may belong to that section.  It has many
thousand of members.  The members of the section are then entitled to
affiliate with certain divisions.  One of the divisions is the computer
division. Within that division, there are many sub groups which include
user groups such as mini/mainfram user group, document assembly user
group, communications UG, word processing UG, litigation support
systems UG, etc.  There is even a small (but elegant and dedicated)
UNIX USERS GROUP. 

(In fact, I hope that some of its members who are on the net will post 
followups to this so you can see that unix lawyers do really exist.)

The legal market for hardware and software is a substantial market and 
there are many lawyers who are both interested and in and knowledgable 
regarding computers. 

Anyway -- the computer division of the economics section publishes a
periodic news letter called "Network".  In the May/June issue there 
appeared an article written by James Sprowl.  

>From the article, I surmise that Jim is a dos prisoner.  However, since
he is writing for an audience of (mostly) other legal dos prisoners and
since he views the future as seen through the eyes of a non-unix
person, it strikes me that his views as published and read by thousands
of lawyers who have a strong interest in computers generally might be
of interest to netlanders and to the companys who employ them.  

There are technical inaccuracies in the article, however it should not
be criticized for that.  Its value lies in seeing the greater horizon
from the eyes of a dos prisoner who is looking beyond his prison bars.

It is of significant interest to note that he concludes that "OS/2 with
the Presentation Manager will emerge first and will prosper for a time,
but I predict that UNIX will be the big winner in the long run."

Some of you may also have noticed the article in the latest Word
Perfect newsletter which extolls the virtues of the UNIX operating
system and gives a good historical overview.

Of course there is also the infoworld article from two weeks ago which
test and compare Xenix and Interactive SysV.

If the mainstream dos user recognizes that there is new and exciting
software (os) technology out there which can take them far beyond their
current limitations, that is significant.  That they don't know that
UNIX was there years before dos was created (nearly before Bill Gates
was born) isn't important.  

With permission of the author, I have reproduced his article which I
believe you will find interesting even if you don't agree with all his
conclusions.
=======================================================================
Rohan Kelley -- UNIleX Systems, Inc. (Systems and software for lawyers)
UUCP:  ...{gatech!uflorida,ucf-cs}!novavax!bigbroth!rk (office)
                                   novavax!mdlbrotr!rk (home)
ATTmail:  attmail!bigbroth!rk
3365 Galt Ocean Drive, Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33308 Phone: (305) 563-1504

"Go first class or your heirs will" -somebodyelse
=======================================================================

Sprowl Predicts Where
Hardware is Headed:

                          The Clouds Begin To Clear

By James A. Sprowl, Technical Editor, ABA506

When purchasing a computer today, you have to make a difficult choice.  Do
you purchase the least expensive computer and risk it not being fast enough
or powerful enough to run the programs of tomorrow, as well as some of those
of today?  Do you purchase a faster mid-price model that is more likely to
run all the new programs for the next few years but which may not be able
to handle the truly advanced programs now appearing on $10,000 systems or
the upgrades of today's programs?  Do you purchase a "top-of-the-line"
product now, knowing that the software to fully utilize the product's power is
not yet available and that the same computer will cost much less in a year or
two?  Or do you purchase an Apple Macintosh to gain the most advanced user
interface at the price of possibly cutting yourself off from some of the
software options?

    These are difficult choices.  And until very recently, no one could give
you any indication of what the future would hold.  Would the IBM operating
system of the future be MS-DOS, UNIX, or Os/2?  What of the NEXT computer from
Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple?  Would IBM compatibles still be around in a
few years?  What about Apples?  Prior to this past December, these questions
could not be answered.  But now information released by the major players in
the marketplace has finally given us some indication of where things are headed. 
Let me piece together the information recently released, try to predict where we
will be several years from now and suggest what impact all of this should have
on your purchasing decisions in the months to come.  (But my wife would warn
you that I bought into NBI stock at 31; it is now selling for 1-1/2.)

    First of all, the Macintosh system is still several years ahead of the rest of
the industry.  Unless Apple really botches things, the Mac will remain the
standard against which other computers are judged for some time to come, and
its sales will continue to grow.  It will remain a premium product, priced 50
percent above the price of comparable IBM PC compatible equipment, and it will
continue to build market share against the competition.  But because there are
more PCs than Macs in the field, software development will continue to lag on
some Mac Products.  (Regarding system prices, see "A Systematic Computer
Systems Decision," page 1. -- Ed.)

    It is now clear that OS\2, IBM's and Microsoft's vaunted new operating
system, has failed to catch on in its present form, even with its fancy
Presentation Manager user interface.  Therefore, it will be redesigned extensively
over the coming 12 months into a much more powerful system that will work
much more like the Macintosh user interface.  Look for the following
improvements: "point-and-click" mouse facilities, very large file and disk drive
memory management capabilities and support for very long file names.  The
tradeoff for these improvements will be far less compatibility with PC-DOS and
MS-DOS.  Os/2 files will no longer be compatible with DOS files, although both
types of files will coexist on the same disk drive.

    When using OS\2 on the newest 80386 and 80386sx PCs a year from now,
you will be able to run two or more standard PC-DOS programs at the same time. 
The price?  You will need a fast 80386 PC with 4 to 8 megabytes of expensive
high-speed memory.  That 80286 PC you bought because you were promised it
would run OS\2 will run OS\2 -- the old version of OS\2 that Microsoft and
IBM will begin to leave behind next year when the new 80386 version of OS\2
begins to take over the universe. You will be able to network your 80286
machines and 80386 machines together using this older version of OS\2, but the
future otherwise belongs to the 80386 machines.

    The problem with the 80286 processor chip is historical.  Like the 8088 it
cannot manage more than 64K of program or data at a single time.  It forces
programmers to slice up programs and data into little bitty pieces.  It also cannot
intercept screen writes and therefore cannot "tame" many DOS programs into
running within a window.  And the 80286 can only run one DOS program at a
time, while halting everything else.  The 80386 processor chip, all the Macintosh
(actually Motorola 68000 series - Ed.) chips and the new, much faster RISC chips
can manage much bigger chunks of memory.  They do so by slicing up the chunks
in ways that the programmers are not even aware of.  In the long-term, the
programmer community will "doom" the 80286 processor (this will probably take
five years or more, however).

    Meanwhile, UNIX continues to gather support in the marketplace, with the
federal government insisting on UNIX minicomputer versions of all programs it
purchases on PCs.  AT&T and several other vendors are rapidly working to
integrate all versions of UNIX into a single operating system that can be ported
over to virtually any central processing unit.  And, under funding provided by
IBM and DEC, MIT has created a public domain graphical windowing front-end
for UNIX called "X Windows."  X Windows is supported by IBM, Apple and all
the players.  It creates a uniform, networkable user interface into which other
standardized user interface packages may be readily installed.  The beauty of
UNIX with X Windows is that the dissimilar hardware of different computers and
terminals is hidden behind X Windows -- X Windows looks the same despite the
user's hardware.  This means that any UNIX user running X Windows can use
any one of several different UNIX user interfaces that will be developed over
the next year.

    What will the UNIX user interface be?  AT&T, which has now teamed up
with Sun Microsystems, the most successful maker of professional workstations,
has proposed a UNIX user interface standard: "Open Look."  It will be shipped
with AT&T Standard UNIX starting this Fall.  But Open Look may not catch on. 
Concerned about the power of AT&T teamed up with Sun, other vendors, lead by
IBM, DEC and Hewlett Packard, have set up the "Open Software Foundation" to
develop their own standard version of UNIX.  The Open Software Foundation
recently adopted Microsoft's Presentation Manager as a UNIX standard user
interface.

    Think of it -- the next incarnation of Presentation Manager may become a
standard user interface for both OS\2 and UNIX!  I can't think of anything that
would make software vendors happier than to have the same program source code
run substantially without change under both UNIX and OS\2, and also under MS-
DOS with Windows 386.  So this proposal is a natural to catch on quickly with
the DOS and UNIX software community.

    Another candidate for the standard user interface for UNIX is NEXT
computer's NextStep interface, which is based on the PostScript language that
has taken over the high-end printer market.  Look for NextStep to grow in
popularity.  Software developers will like it since it permits the same programmer
language to be used when talking to the printer or screen, and it will lend itself
nicely to desktop publishing.  But software developers will initially prefer the
Presentation Manager interface.

    Accordingly, I predict that UNIX with the Presentation Manager will win the
operating system wars, long run.  It will run PC-DOS programs in windows on
80386 PCs, just as early PCs ran CP/M programs for a few years until CP/M
programs went out of style.  You will need an 80386 IBM PC or compatible, or
an 86030(sic) Macintosh or a new RISC processor (see below) to run this new
version of UNIX, which will be ready in about a year.  It will catch on slowly.

    OS\2 with the Presentation Manager will emerge first and will prosper for a
time, but I predict that UNIX will be the big winner in the long run.  And since
software houses will be able to port programs freely back and forth between
UNIX and OS\2, there will be no shortage of software on either operating system,
and they will share the limelight for some time to come.  OS\2 will always
require an 80386 or 80486 -- a particular type of microprocessor.  Even Intel
now admits that the newer RISC chips are much faster than the 80386.  Intel
just introduced what may be the worlds fastest RISC chip, and it will never run
OS\2 -- but it will soon run UNIX.  UNIX will also create a bridge for software
between the Mac and IBM/Microsoft worlds.

    The 80286 IBM PC compatibles and the present version of the OS\2 operating
system are already obsolete.  If you purchase any 80286 machines, you should
shop for price and plan on giving them a less prestigious role in future years. 
Do not shop for speed that is not needed now and that will not help you in the
future -- the new programs will not run properly on this microprocessor.

    Personally, and to be economical, I plan to stick to the most inexpensive of
the 10-megacycle conventional 8088 PCs.  If I were into networking, however, I
would stick to the 12-megacycle 286 PCs which will run OS\2 for networking.  I
would avoid 386s for the next year or two (except where their speed is needed)
until OS\2 for the 80386 emerges from Microsoft's laboratories in about 12 to 18
months.  At that time, the price difference between 286s and the 386s will be so
small there will be little point in purchasing the 286s.  The 386s will be
available at that time in all price and speed varieties.  And the 386s will readily
adapt to UNIX when it arrives.  Meanwhile, if you want the best in
sophistication, buy a Macintosh with a 68030.  It is here now, and it will adapt
to the future whenever the future arrives.  But make sure it supports all the
software that you need.

    What of displays?  Only the VGA standard, or extensions of VGA standard,
will survive into the future on IBM PCs and compatibles.  What of printers? 
Longterm, only the PostScript equipped printers will survive.  PostScript printers
will sell at premium for several more years.

James A. Sprowl, 135 S. LaSalle St., Chicago, IL 60604.  312/372-7842.  ABA506.