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Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 3.7 KB

Path: newsfeed.internetmci.com!gatech!gt-news!james
From: [e-mail] (James McIninch)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Unix Haters
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Date: 28 Mar 1996 16:11:30 GMT
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
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Robert Dewar ([e-mail]) wrote:
: "Unix's main charm is and always has been that it runs on cheap hardware."

: Another chuckle. Typical Unix systems today require skads of memory,
: and typically you find Unix only on high end machines, while the 99%
: of lower end machines are running other OS's (System 7, DOS, WIndows)

I dunno about that. Linux only requires 4 Meg of memory (and, actually, it is
possible to run a stripped down kernel in about 2 Meg), and on a 386 no less.
You'd be really hard pressed to find another OS that can run with so few
resources and on such inexpensive hardware.

The reason that most machines are running System 7, DOS, or Windows (NT/95) is
mostly the result of marketing and has nothing to do with the OS per se. The
Mac OS touts itself as the OS for morons and Windows is good because Bill Gates
says it is and alot of other people use it (therefore, it must be good). So far,
quality for consumer level computer products has yet to surpass decent marketing
as the predominant affector of consumer purchasing decisions. From a developer
standpoint, you write software that people will buy. In the absence of a
standard OS (or even API), you just pick which is likely to sell for the
application concerned. Since there are alot of people using MacOS and Windows,
you write for those, not because they're powerful, efficient, easy to work
with, etc., but because people will buy your stuff. If you write large-scale
projects for mission-critical applications in networked environments, chances
are pretty good you'll work with UNIX, which has the greatest market share
for that sort of thing.

Personally, my experience with a wide array of OS's on various platforms is
that most UNIXes are fairly small, Linux being one of the best. Most PC UNIXes,
with the possible exception of Solaris, have system requirements similar to
those of Windows NT (but usually less) and generally perform considerably better
than Microsoft-based software (from the standpoint of numerical computation,
integer and floating point, which is my central concern). The MacOS is sort
of cumbersome, but it's going for the idiot niche, not my market share. OS/2
has some very nice features, but is also often cumbersome and it's been more
or less orphaned by IBM and the rest of the industry. VMS is a pain in the butt,
but I can't think of a nicer OS for the management of large databases.
NeXTStep is pretty damned cool, too cool to ever be popular to the masses.
The Amiga Exec was very nicely done but is more or less an orphan now too (but
you can see parts of it popping up in newer versions of all sorts of OS's,
which is kind of cool). There's all sorts of others, I've fiddled with too.
I use Linux for work and play, Windows95 for word-processing and a spreadsheet.

Note: this has nothing to do with comp.lang.c, so move it somewhere else...