Aima.42
net.general
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!yale-com!ima!johnl
Wed Feb 24 10:58:41 1982
The Real World
>From _T_h_e _E_c_o_n_o_m_i_s_t, February 20, 1982.
[ For those unfamiliar with _T_h_e _E_c_o_n_o_m_i_s_t, it's kind of the English
equivalent of Time or Newsweek, but with slightly more of a business
orientation. The Feb. 20 issue also has an interesting article on
the TRS-80 model 16 compared to other 16-bit micros and another on
TI's LSI analogue chips. ]
Software Options: AT&T weighs in
Murray Hill, New Jersey
America's telecommunications behemoth, AT&T, looks set for its
first important computing triumph. The battleground is the
fast-emerging small-business market for 16-bit computers. The
opposition consists of several much smaller companies. The
objective is to set the de facto standard for the so-called
operating system software needed to marshall the running of
stacks of computer programmes and to carry out other unglamorous
house-keeping chores on the 16-bit machines. AT&T's answer is a
system called Unix, which has now been adapted for this market
and more competitively priced.
Tremble AT&T's main rival, the small if thrusting
Californian company, Digital Research. Digital's operating
system (the CP/M) is used on over half of the smaller 8-bit
personal computers now installed and the company had hoped its
various 16-bit systems would do as well. That now looks most
unlikely.
Unix has had two boosts -- both thanks to AT&T's
manufacturing wing, Western Electric. Late last year, Western
Electric introduced a version of Unix pitched specifically at the
commercial user and simultaneously slashed the cost of licences
to use the system by as much as tenfold (to just $250 in one
case).
A backlog of licence applications has already built up, and
five or six makers of 16-bit computers in America -- including
Fortune Systems and Altos -- are now offering Unix systems on
their machines. Even before these moves, Unix had managed to
garner a select coterie of 3,000 users among universities,
software development outfits and the like.
Unix's big attraction lies in its technical attributes.
Foremost among them is its basic construction. Bell
Laboratories' aim in developing Unix was to provide a clean,
simple operating system in stark contrast to the large,
convoluted systems that went before. IBM's System/360 operating
system, created in the mid-1960s, took over 5,000 man-years to
develop. Unix was initially developed by two people working in
an attic at Bell Labs.
The designers wanted to produce a software framework which
could be easily extended to embody new features. Unix was to
provide the "grammar" for an operating system into which others
could slot "words" to suit a particular context.
The result was a three-tier system. At Unix's heart is
the operating system itself, which supervises the scheduling of
computer tasks and manages information storage. Then comes the
so-called shell, which calls up the individual programmes to be
run. Thirdly there are the programmes instructing the computer
to do certain routine chores such as word processing, memory
management, and so on.
Within this tier structure lie some other features which
make Unix easy to use both for operating existing programmes and
for creating new ones. These include:
* _F_o_r_m_a_t_l_e_s_s _f_i_l_i_n_g. Files are fundamental to computing: they
contain the data which number crunchers crunch. In most cases
the unfortunate programmer has to specify both the location and
size of the file he wants the machine to use. Not with Unix.
The result is faster and easier programming.
* _P_i_p_i_n_g. This allows the output from one programme to be used
as the input for another -- or even the replacement of one or
more complete programmes by another. So it is possible to build
up new programmes from old, saving time and money.
* _P_o_r_t_a_b_l_i_t_y. This vogue-word means being able to move software
from one computer to another. Unlike many made-to-measure
operating systems, Unix is easy to transfer -- a particular
advantage since Unix runs on both 16-bit and 32-bit
minicomputers. When a company has outgrown its smaller machine,
it can move its operating system (and all its subsidiary
programmes) to its newer, bigger one.
Unix does have one potential Achilles heel. Not much
application software has been written for it. Here Digital
Research has the upper hand. Though amateurish compared to Unix
it its construction, the CP/M system has many hundreds of
programmes under its belt. Still, given the consummate ease of
writing programmes to run on Unix, this disadvantage should not
prove a major one. Perhaps the final comment should rest with
the Japanese. They have already selected Unix to be their
standard operating system for 16-bit computers.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <
[email protected]>
of
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The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996
Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.
