Jordan Pollack wrote: > > I am consulting at a small company which uses NT. The appeal of NT > is very obvious. You have access to all the legacy windows3/95 applications, > plus MS has started copying REAL operating systems > features from unix (and VMS - so why doesnt DEC sue Microsoft as well?:) IIRC, Microsoft and DEC have signed agreements to share technology in this area. > But the mystery is: Why didn't makers of other operating systems - > OS/2 Solaris, MacOS, IRIX, Ultrix, Linux - evolve to the pentium and > pentium pro box and provide the api to run windows apps within > their own environment? For one, Linux has *always* run on Intel systems. Second, Sun has provided a version of Solaris that has run on Intel systems for quite a while. Third, OS/2 has run on Intel systems from the beginning. Ultrix is no longer made (and hasn't been for at least 3 or 4 years). As far as MacOS and IRIX systems, not everyone believes the Intel propoganda and thinks that Pentium chips are the hottest things out there. Intel systems are burdened by a history that makes writing operating systems difficult. Witness the failure of plug and play in Windows 95 to deliver on it's promises. As for IRIX systems, it has only been recently that Pentium systems have been able to deliver the performace needed by SGI's target audience. High-end SGI systems still far outperform any available Pentium system. MacOS's best feature is the ease of use that it delivers. I think that ease of use would have been compromised had MacOS been ported to Intel systems due to the wide variety and varying quality of Intel peripherals out there. The PowerPC CPU has lately overtaken the Pentium in performance. And when you compare similarily equipped Intel system and MacOS systems the price difference is negligible. Intel systems have no technological advantages that aren't available in other systems. The only advantage that the Intel system has is the large installed base and the Microsoft marketing and legal departments. > Perhaps we should ask those companies CTO's... Perhaps you should do some more research before posting inaccuracies like this. Jeff
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