[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[John Wallace]

On Aug 20, 10:17 pm, David Froble <da... at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> Simon Clubley wrote:
> > On 2012-08-20, David Froble <da... at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> >> I really don't understand this attitude that Unix is so great and inevitable.
> >> Seems mostly a self fulfilling prophecy rather than based upon merit.  I guess
> >> if you say something enough, people might start believing it.
>
> > Well for starters, in just one market segment, there's getting on for
> > about 1 million new devices per day which contain the Linux kernel
> > (if not the traditional userland tools) been activated by users.
>
> > In some markets, Unix is not only inevitable, it has already arrived and
> > it's not going to displaced any time soon.
>
> > You will also find, even when the underlying OS is not really Unix, that
> > a number of OS vendors have implemented a Unix-style POSIX programming
> > environment. This appears to be very common in the RTOS world.
>
> > Simon.
>
> So, are you saying this is what happened, or are you saying that Unix won these
> jobs by merit?  What I'm asking about is merit.
>
> If DEC had positioned VMS to perform all these jobs, and I'm talking 1990 or
> perhaps even before, including proper marketing and pricing, would it (VMS) have
> been feasible, or are you saying VMS could not do the job?
>
> I know that DEC blew it by trying to milk every last penny in profits, with no
> vision of the future.  But what I'm saying is, I don't think Unix was a superior
> OS, and I do think that VMS could have been the de facto standard that Unix is
> today.
>
> Address the merits of Unix ..

Superior at what?

Running DOS apps? No, UNIX is not good at that. Running VMS apps? UNIX
is not good at that either. There were lots of stuff a decent UNIX was
good at, such as supporting a wide variety of different hardware, and
different classes of application (workstation, server, realtime, etc)
and later on it was good at being vendor independent courtesy of the
open standards processes etc. Customers and consultants had been
saying that vendor independence and open standards and the like were
important to them.

Then along came Windows NT which in reality was/is neither multi-
platform capable nor was/is it vendor independent. But allegedly it
was cheap.

Now lots of supposedly smart IT people think it's perfectly OK to be
locked in to one (software) vendor for core products, and a similar
number of IT people are quite happy to be locked in to one hardware
vendor too.

You work it out. I can't