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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!cancer.vividnet.com!hunter.premier.net!news-res.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!news.mathworks.com!uunet!in2.uu.net!netnews.nwnet.net!symiserver2.symantec.com!usenet From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Solaris vs SunOs Date: 23 Aug 1996 06:12:13 GMT Organization: Symantec Corporation Lines: 43 Message-ID: <4vji3t$6f1@symiserver2.symantec.com> References: <4vabsr$4mt@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> <321A5DF4.FF6D5DF@FreeBSD.org> <4vf6dq$sgj@panix.com> <4vfist$kv@hermes.acs.unt.edu> Reply-To: tedm@agora.rdrop.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.6.34.1 X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2.5 In <4vfist$kv@hermes.acs.unt.edu>, jackson@replicant.csci.unt.edu (Bruce Jackson) writes: >In article <4vf6dq$sgj@panix.com>, Bryan Althaus <bryan@panix.com> wrote: > >> ATTENTION: UCB BSD is DEAD... SunOS 4.x is DEAD... move on to >> Solaris 2.x it's Sun's future, and SVR4 is SCO's and HP's future >> also. > >I know I'll regret not ignoring this flamebait. > >BSD is not dead. With the advent of 386bsd, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and >OpenBSD there are far more computers and users running BSD UNIX now >than any time in history. All the managers I know of who managed both The one thing about HP and Sun though that people forget is that they are Unix hardware vendors. The real future of Unix is Unix running on Intel chips, not Unix running on somebodies idea of a super-risc proprietary as all get out hardware box. That's the old idea of Unix, and it is a terrible anchor in acceptance of Unix in the corporate arena. How many times have you talked to people who think that Unix cannot run on the 386, 486, 586, 686 chip PC's? I've talked to lots of people like that who's only exposure to Unix is some Sparcstation with a monitor weighing 200 pounds sitting on it that is totally incompatible with any VGA monitor ever produced. With that kind of backing it is no wonder people are running to NT. People like HP and Sun want to sell workstation hardware, nice, incompatible, hardware that cannot be repaired by the local PC chop-shop, must be carried under an expensive service contract, and is obsolete a year later necessitating an expensive upgrade to a new hardware box. They run Unix on there because they were able to liscense the source from AT&T years ago, they are not software companies, understand. The fact is that the risc-vs-cisc processor arguement died a long time ago, cisc has overwhelmingly won, and now with the advent of the PCI bus the proprietary-workstation-hardware vs the Intel-IBMPC hardware arguement is dead as well. It's like Apple Computers. Everyone knows that the day that the MacOS gets ported to the IBM PC is the day that Apple sells their last Macintosh computer, that is why a MacOS port to Intel will never happen. The same is true of HP/UX, at least Sun is making an attempt to leave an escape hatch for themselves, although it's always interesting to me how much better Solaris runs on Sun hardware than the competition's.