CompuServe Messages

Leslie, The Unix world has been trying to agree on specs for a unified graphics environment for years. XWindows is the defacto standard. Unix users have finally stopped their in-fighting and are now more in agreement as to how to procede. Windows NT has been the scare that has unified them. And they may just be too late. Unix and a few other proprietary Os's run what is essesentially the business backbone of the world. NT is positioned to steal the entire enterprise system that UNIX has dominated so long. UNIX was the only OS that a graduate from any decent computer science program would want to use. But it has had many weaknesses. NT has addressed many of those weaknesses, especially real-time processing. And it has maintained and improved on all the essential features of UNIX. It is extremely well implemented. It is almost unlimited in its scope. It will truly be able to control any system from a supercomputer to the desktop- and as already been pointed out, its smaller versions, a la Windows 95 (Chicago) will be what the average desktop user will employ. Its only shortcoming is also its greatest strength – the fact that It is available only from a single vendor. The up side is that all the confusion resulting from the various flavors of UNIX will go away. The negative is that if MS doesn't want NT to perform in a certain way, then users who want that flavor will be out of luck. But I don't think that will be a problem. I think that MS intends that NT will be able to do anything that is asked of it. And I think they will pull this off. I think that NT will fare very well in the upper echelons of computing. And in computers _everything_ trickles down from the top. What does MS have standing in its way? IBM (OS/2), Novell (Owners of UNIX source code and rulers of the world of networking), Apple, and Sun. Pretty formidible opposition, if only they were united. Rich