Unix dead??? (long message)

Guy Harris guy at sun.uucp
Sat Aug 9 04:17:39 AEST 1986


>                   UNIX IS DEAD!  WANNA FIGHT??
>                          John C. Dvorak
...
>      "IBM's VM is the happening operating system," was my quick
> rejoinder.

You're right, this article is certainly amusing - good joke, John!  Of
course, he isn't serious about this; VM certainly isn't happening on any IBM
PC's out there, with the *possible* exception of the PC-XT/370, and I'm not
sure even that is running *real* VM.  VM isn't going to happen on any PCs
until you start seeing recruitment ads reading "IBM needs a few hundred
experts in 370 assembler and the Intel 8086 family to rewrite an operating
system made of lots of 370 assembler code and (maybe) PL/S for a completely
different machine with the opposite byte order and a different
floating-point format."

Of course, all the stories in the trade rags (about the same page size as
the National Midnight Star and, at times, about as accurate) about how
people are looking forward to running not only VM but *MVS* on their PCs are
even more amusing.

Another good joke Dvorak stuck in was the remark about cryptic UNIX
commands - a lot of business people seem to be able to handle cryptic
MS-DOS commands on their PCs.
-- 
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy at sun.com (or guy at sun.arpa)



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