Comparison of 386 UNIX offerings

Gerry Gleason gerry at zds-ux.UUCP
Sat Feb 3 03:46:45 AEST 1990


In article <1990Feb1.202942.5160 at ddsw1.MCS.COM> karl at mcs.MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) writes:
>In article <206 at emdeng.Dayton.NCR.COM> ewasser at emdeng.Dayton.NCR.COM (Ed.Wasser) writes:
>> [ requests info on various i[34]86 UNIX's ]

>If experience from the past serves, ISC will be first with the V.4 release.

For V.4, you should also talk directly to the people at Intel.  The came out
here to talk to us, and my take on the situation is that Intel is really
worried about both how late SCO and to a lesser extent ISC has been with
Intel ports, and the way these two are fragmenting the market.  I'm not
sure of the exact status of Intel's port (Beta or what), but it is available,
and whatever they do is supposed to be sent back to AT&T to be part of their
Intel reference port.

The only problem I see is that they don't seem to be concerned enough about
addressing the areas that SCO and ISC diverge on, namely package installation,
disk partitioning, and a standard way to add SCSI host adapter drivers.  SCO
and ISC seem to be trying to differenciate their products with meaningless
differences in these areas, but it's hard to blame them since the reference
port does not have reasonable solutions in these areas.  Standardization is
just as important in these areas as for an ABI, and Intel will not succeed
in unifying this market unless these issues are addressed.


>>    Security enhancements

>SCO has "C2" security certification; ISC does not.

ISC has this, but I don't think it's quite released yet.  Theirs is better
because it really is an add on package (though it replaces lots of stuff so
you can't really back it out), so you still won't have the security stuff
getting in your way if you don't want it.  With SCO you can reduce the level
of security to a low level, but you can't make it go away completely.

Gerry Gleason



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