From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 1997 09:53:39 +0800
To: cypherpunks@Algebra.COM
Subject: Re: Is Unix dying--or even dead?
In-Reply-To: <199712190745.JAA17166@ankara.duzen.com.tr>
Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19971219174923.00734230@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 12:08 PM 12/19/1997 GMT, phelix@vallnet.com wrote:
>>Silicon Graphics Inc.'s plan .... Windows NT 

>Does this mean that Unix is dying?
>No, it means that graphics professionals are buying Wintel boxes 
>instead of SGI's expensive workstations. ( a shame really,
> SGI make some damn nice workstations, but that 
>pesky price/performance ratio is pushing people into
>high end Wintel boxes)

It's not just price/performance ratio - 
it's affordable price for adequate performance.
Now that Wintel boxes can crunch integers as well as a Cray-1,
a $2K box has enough horsepower for all but really cutting-edge graphics,
and you're going to buy the same monitor regardless of CPU.
Sure, a $10K SGI probably has far more than 5x the performance,
but not many people need it, especially if they're developing 
applications for other people to use on cheaper boxes (games...)
as opposed to producing TV shows, music videos, or running
scientific visualization.

That's been a problem for the accounting and office-work for years
- while Microsoft can bloat away any CPU you've got,
an 8086 or 286 box could run spreadsheets, simple chart graphics,
WordStar, a database, BASIC, and Flight Simulator as fast as a PDP-11
for a lot less money, letting the business bootstrap itself
in spite of the ugly excuse for a program loader MS sold for it,
because any developer could afford the $5K (1982) or $2K (1997) box
it takes to develop cool commercially viable applications
(and, yes, you can use a $500 box today, but you wouldn't.)

My 1983 VAX 11/780 cost $400K for a machine with enough horsepower
to support 40-60 users ( A MILLION instructions/sec!  4MB RAM, 
1 GB of removable disk, 2 6250bpi tape drives, and a big line printer.)
You might get by spending $250K to support 40 users, including VT100s,
but that's still as much money per seat as a fancy PC, for a
faster but non-graphical environment.  MSDOS was blazingly stupid
and harder to use than Unix, but running on a PC instead of a terminal
makes some things much easier.

If you must run MSware, NT is at least an operating system.
And it's easier to get graphics board manufacturers to write
their drivers for Windows than Linux.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639