29 Oct
2000
29 Oct
'00
6:44 a.m.
See... that's why AT&T and BSD had to hook
students in college.
If they got VAX/VMS or TOPS10 or TOPS20 in college it was much harder
for the Unix virus to infect them. If they started with Unix they got
the idea every OS had to be Unix-like to be good.
Dec DID have the campuswide Software Licence Grant. Both my undergrad and
graduate schools had these and ran Vaxen running VMS. This is where I learned
to be such a VMS bigot. :) The problem is in the late 80s and early 90s
they started jerking colleges around with the program - raising the prices,
reducing the layered products - not understanding that at a university it
really DOES make sense to rip out and throw away years of work and run BSD
on Vaxen instead of paying extra support charges. And as you say, once you
infect people with unix while they still think its obtuseness and inconsistancy
are fun, you've lost them.
Unfortunately, OS varieties seem to be dwindling as the Windows or Unix
varients push the others out of the data centers. Even IBM seems to be
aiding this movement. (They killed OS/2 on PPC and adopted Linux and AIX --
didn't they).
What kills me is what Compaq has done (or not bothered to do, in this case).
They have the hardware and operating systems to *own* the server market.
Alphas with VMS on them would make infinately better servers than NT for any
purpose I can think of. But they seem unwilling to provide much more than
lukewarm support for the VMS world they now own. You have to wonder how
abusive Microsoft's licences are for them.
Some days I really do think most of whats wrong with computing today can be put
at Microsoft's doorstep. Between their marketing, their (illegal) licensing
schemes, and the reactions of the computing community to these scams - namely
the wholesale embrace of Linux, which brings up all the warts of Unix mentioned
above, but is at least free - it seems like they caused a lot of it, at least
in the US. Don't even get me started with what they did to BeOS.
Anyway. Back to the topic... If there's a good side to corpate computing
embracing unix and winblows, it's that vaxen and other classic machines
wind up in our hands while they still have plenty of years of running time
left, and we can personally benefit from what used to be thriving user
communities and software. (the Decus libraries are what I'm thinking of here,
does this kind of thing exist for other machines and OSs?) That's got to be
worth something.
--
Jim Strickland
jim(a)DIESPAMMERSCUMcalico.litterbox.com
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