Date: Mon, 25 Sep 1995 18:33:48 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: nate@rocky.sri.MT.net (Nate Williams) Cc: terry@lambert.org, nate@rocky.sri.MT.net, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Unix and the desktop ( was Re: ports startup scripts) Message-ID: <199509260133.SAA06459@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199509260050.SAA12272@rocky.sri.MT.net> from "Nate Williams" at Sep 25, 95 06:50:27 pm
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> > You can't lose what you never had. You presume (incorrectly) that there > > was ever an attempt by UNIX to own the desktop, that this mythical attempt > > failed, and that the desktop is thus "lost". > > Hmm, seems SCO *attempted* to win the desktop. Their *actual* > (vs. mythical) attempt failed. As a matter of fact, the name of the > product was called "Open Desktop" perchance. ;) SCO did not try to win the desktop. You can't win the destop by replacing a contender (Xenix) with a piece of crap (SVR3). I would be very suprised, given the large Microsoft ownership of SCO, if SCO did not take a dive on that one, if I didn't know for a fact that they shot themselves in the foot in an attempt to capture government $$$. I used Alpha and Beta ODT on Xenix before SVR3 was forced down SCO's throat by the Desktop III and AFCAC 451 contract bids by their Federal Systems Division on the basis of SVID requirements as CLIN's on the Request For Bids. It was usable. At the time, the fastest hardware you could get was an Everex Step/20. After the switch to SVR3, SCO was unusable, period, let alone for running ODT on barely-sufficient-under-Xenix-hardware. I also attended the 1989 SCO Developer conference in Santa Cruz on the UCSC campus (not my first time at the conference) and argued long and hard with Doug Michaels and a number of other vendors on "the appearance of speed" with regard to delaying client EXPOSE events until the window manager had processed them to completion instead of having the client and window manager competing to be swapped in and running simultaneously. Better to have a window manager that looks fast and a client that looks fast than having both of them look slow. The only person on my side at the time was a graphics board vendor, who used fiber-optic lines out to display/keyboard units (I forget the vendor name). We had software on both Desktop III and AFCAC 451 bids for all vendors that were bidding SCO. We were the only package that met full CLIN's, mostly because everyone else ignored performance and user interface issues (SCO still lost). I categorically *DENY* that SCO *ever* made a *serious* attempt at the desktop market. They compromised their position very early on in order to compete on Federal contracts that never worked out. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.home | help
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