Yup. Another yawn. I was at Digital when we tried to unify our UNIX with SCO - it was called the Ace Initiative. Talk about "impedance mismatch". I saw the manager that proposed that boondogle take a hike down to HP and start the same project there. When IBM started talking about ganging up with SCO last summer I could see this guy's face behind it.
This one is probably doomed. Every *NIX development group that I've ever met has been arrogant beyond belief (present company included) and mixing any two of them has been like oil and water.
Not to worry.
I think the best long term strategy for Linux is to nail down that Mom & Pop desktop (& set-top) market with kernel 2.2 while the kernel heavies continue to roll in bigger and better enterprise features.
When I joined Digital in 1984 I was hired into the UNIX group at Merrimack, NH. On Day One, they gave me an email account: decvax!ccb. They also gave me a cube and a brand-new VT100. I took it out of the box and connected it to the serial cable in my office. At the other end of this cable was "Abyss" - a DEC VAX/11-780. A DEC VAX/11-780 had all of the computer power of perhaps a 386DX25. We probably had about 500mb of disk space and I think we had 4MB RAM. My terminal was one of 40 or so. We'd all be on there awking and grepping and running vi and using the compiler and all having a great time. Abyss was running a new operating system called "ULTRIX" - a newly commercialized version of 4.2c BSD UNIX.
Within a year we introduced the uVAX-II/GPX at roughly the same horsepower level and the world's first commercial release of the MIT X Window System. This was a machine that topped out at 9MB RAM and was designed for a single user...
In those days a UNIX kernel weighed in at about 300kb (we didn't compress kernels in those days) and you could actually install a fully functional UNIX system in under 27MB of disk space with plenty of room to spare.
My current computer (k6/2-300, 4.5GB, 128MB RAM) was pretty close to inconceivable as a home computer six years ago when I bought my first PC (486dx/33, 340MB, 8MB RAM).
All that being said, unless we start to go nutty with voice processing or mondo 3d, I think the current generation hardware is a mature plateau for the desktop platform.
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Yup. Another yawn. I was at Digital when we tried to unify our UNIX with SCO - it was called the Ace Initiative. Talk about "impedance mismatch". I saw the manager that proposed that boondogle take a hike down to HP and start the same project there. When IBM started talking about ganging up with SCO last summer I could see this guy's face behind it.
This one is probably doomed. Every *NIX development group that I've ever met has been arrogant beyond belief (present company included) and mixing any two of them has been like oil and water.
Not to worry.
I think the best long term strategy for Linux is to nail down that Mom & Pop desktop (& set-top) market with kernel 2.2 while the kernel heavies continue to roll in bigger and better enterprise features.
ccb (ex decvax!ccb, ccb@osf.org, etc.)
When I joined Digital in 1984 I was hired into the UNIX group at Merrimack, NH. On Day One, they gave me an email account: decvax!ccb. They also gave me a cube and a brand-new VT100. I took it out of the box and connected it to the serial cable in my office. At the other end of this cable was "Abyss" - a DEC VAX/11-780. A DEC VAX/11-780 had all of the computer power of perhaps a 386DX25. We probably had about 500mb of disk space and I think we had 4MB RAM. My terminal was one of 40 or so. We'd all be on there awking and grepping and running vi and using the compiler and all having a great time. Abyss was running a new operating system called "ULTRIX" - a newly commercialized version of 4.2c BSD UNIX.
Within a year we introduced the uVAX-II/GPX at roughly the same horsepower level and the world's first commercial release of the MIT X Window System. This was a machine that topped out at 9MB RAM and was designed for a single user...
In those days a UNIX kernel weighed in at about 300kb (we didn't compress kernels in those days) and you could actually install a fully functional UNIX system in under 27MB of disk space with plenty of room to spare.
My current computer (k6/2-300, 4.5GB, 128MB RAM) was pretty close to inconceivable as a home computer six years ago when I bought my first PC (486dx/33, 340MB, 8MB RAM).
All that being said, unless we start to go nutty with voice processing or mondo 3d, I think the current generation hardware is a mature plateau for the desktop platform.
And a nice GIMP image of an undead Bill Gates
for the mascot!