Cave Men and Dinosaurs

[Gene Hightower]

In article <1991May25.052820.27220 at am.dsir.govt.nz> sramtrc at albert.dsir.govt.nz writes:
>I think your statement is
>so obvious (is the Pope Catholic?) that we can safely assume that Apple is
>working on SVR4 right this minute.

Assume whatever you will.  Apple is not known as a progressive
company.  Shipping a system that calls itself S5R2 at this point in
time tells me that Unix and open systems take a back seat to the very
closed MacOS that is the bread and butter of Apple.

In article <1991May25.052820.27220 at am.dsir.govt.nz> sramtrc at albert.dsir.govt.nz writes:
>Have you noticed that with time, A/UX is looking more like MacOS and MacOS is
>looking like A/UX? I would like to see this continue till they converge
>and A/UX is dropped. Then MacOS will be unix compatible and buyers will not
>buy SunOS when for the same price they can get MacOS on superior hardware.

Since when has Apple ever produced "superior hardware" at the "same
price" as Sun, or anyone else for that matter.  Macintosh systems are
simple 68k boxes with no special or interesting features at all.

Apple is always behind on clock speed and CPU type.  Right now, I
think, Apple's high end system is a 68030 at 40MHz where other vendors
(i.e. HP and NeXT) are shipping 50MHz '030 systems and 25MHz '040
systems.

Other vendors (Sun included) give you ethernet and much better video
systems as standard features not requiring extra cards.

Apple is not in the business of offering "bang for the buck."

>Then it will be a kind of MacOS/Motif/OpenLook war where MacOS clearly wins
>since it has everything the others have plus thousands of MacOS programs.

Try not to mix up user interface with operating systems.  Apple likes
you to do this because all they have to offer over other 68k boxes is
some user interface code written some years ago and a base of
shrink-wrapped applications that use it.

Operating systems are to provide things like process scheduling,
memory management, filesystems/disk management and networking.  MacOS
can't do those kinds of things like most current Unix systems can.

Window systems and (more correctly) GUI toolkits and guidelines
provide support for user interaction.

I think that no clear winner has been chosen in the GUI war.
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Gene Hightower    gene at segue.com    aero!segue!gene