marketing unix

[Jeff Lee]

> TO Erik E Fair,
> I have not personally used BSD unix so I can't make any speed claims,
> BUT how upward compatable is 4.1 to 4.2??
> All AT&T BTL Unix's are upward compatable.
> Chuck Fingerman
> pegasus!cmf

That's great. So is all Prime hardware and their operating system. So is
all IBM hardware and then you can even run OS/360 to ensure the software
compatibility. Upward compatibility in itself is not always good, but it
is too often practical. To paraphrase the VMS jock who was slurring Unix(tm),
you cannot change some of the bugs (bad defaults, bad design decisions)
because too many programs depend on them.

If total compatibility is your major concern, I don't think Unix(tm) is
going to be the way to go. It is still too immature an operating system
to depend on it being the same farther down the road. System V still
lacks too many things that have to be re-invented everytime someone needs
a certain service. A personal example is file locking. Other systems
have supplied such things for 20 years. I still prefer the Unix(tm)
environment to anything else on which I have worked, but I'm also willing
to make the changes to things that happen to be incompatible. Other
people are not and this causes them headaches.


-- 
Jeff Lee
CSNet:	Jeff @ GATech		ARPA:	Jeff.GATech @ CSNet-Relay
uucp:	...!{akgua,allegra,rlgvax,sb1,unmvax,ulysses,ut-sally}!gatech!jeff