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Date: Thu, 3 Apr 1997 13:49:19 -0600
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: "John S. Quarterman" <jsq@MIDS.ORG>
Subject: Re: RE If Ritchie had had Gates' business accument
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 02 Apr 1997 08:42:07 EST."
<199704031653.KAA09518@akasha.tic.com>
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
>Think the real question would be "What if Dennis Ritchie had *been* Paul Allen ?" Just as Chrysler was not Lee Iaccocca, Microsoft was/is not Bill Gates, he is just the visible component.
Actually, I was careful to phrase the original question without using the verb "to be", so as to address just the aspect of business acumen.
>As is common, the promoter wound up with the lion's share but my impression is that by himself, nothing much would have happened. - not to say that he was not a significant part, just that he was not alone and the right group happened to be in the right place at the right time.
If you really want phrase it in terms of "had *been*", how about "what if Dennis Ritchie had been Henry Ford?" Ford didn't invent the automobile, and Dennis didn't invent the operating system, but both carried forward the idea in new ways. For that matter, Bill Joy came pretty close to being the Henry Ford of UNIX at one point.
Several people seem to be saying that the skills or proclivity to invent something new and those to deploy the new thing widely are not likely to occur in the same person. That may be true, but it seems that sometimes it does happen. It's true Edison was not Tesla. But I didn't ask what would happen if Dijkstra or Turing had had the business sense of Gates. And Edison did come up with a number of interesting ideas himself, and he was instrumental in getting a lot of them out to the public in forms that would sell.
Microsoft gradually picked up in MS-DOS many features of UNIX that were compatible with its primitive single-process model. Now it's finally picking up multiple processes, because the Internet, among other uses, requires them. Of course, it's doing so mostly by resuscitating a failed competitor to UNIX, namely VMS, in the form of W/NT.
Was there no way that UNIX could have become a mass market item and headed off the brain-dead Microsoft operating systems? What would it take for that to happen now?
There was a problem with early PC hardware that it just wasn't up to running UNIX with decent performance, and that was a big handicap. That handicap mostly doesn't exist now; my experience has been that BSDI or Linux or even Solaris on a current PC gets quite noticeably better performance than Windoze.
Is the real problem that, as someone remarked, Microsoft can't control UNIX the way that it can control MS-DOS, Windows, and W/NT? Does this really mean that a truly open system such as UNIX with multiple developers, owners, and hardware platforms cannot win?
Or is it at least partly simply a case of Gates being more astute in business?
I'd be more interested in discussion of issues such as these (preferably with specific historical notes to illustrate them; Interactive UNIX, XENIX, early Sun, etc., all seem relevant) than getting stuck on simple to be or not to be questions.
Defining history in terms of different computer industries also seems relevant. I remember a lot of people scurrying around trying to either make UNIX run on Intel boxes or to come up with a UNIX hardware platform to compete with Wintel. But was a single hardware platform really the solution? Sure, a PC that wanted to compete as a PC as defined by Microsoft had to run on Intel hardware. But was that the only way to compete? Can such industries be defined solely in terms of hardware? Perhaps we're only now getting to the time of an industry that requires a platform-independent multi-process operating system; maybe UNIX was 25 years early....
It's perhaps also worth mentioning that UNIX hasn't lost: by far most servers on the Internet are UNIX boxes.
Thanks,
John
John S. Quarterman <jsq@mids.org>
Editor, MIDS Internet Weather Report, Matrix Maps Quarterly, and Matrix News President, Matrix Information and Directory Services (MIDS) mids@mids.org, http://www.mids.org, +1-512-451-7602, fax: +1-512-452-0127 1106 Clayton Lane, Suite 500W
Austin, TX 78723
U.S.A.
______________________________________________________________________
Reply-To: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> Sender: "CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
Cyberspace" <CYHIST@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: "John S. Quarterman" <jsq@MIDS.ORG>
Subject: Re: RE If Ritchie had had Gates' business accument
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 02 Apr 1997 08:42:07 EST."
<199704031653.KAA09518@akasha.tic.com>
______________________________________________________________________
Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace ______________________________________________________________________
>Think the real question would be "What if Dennis Ritchie had *been* Paul Allen ?" Just as Chrysler was not Lee Iaccocca, Microsoft was/is not Bill Gates, he is just the visible component.
Actually, I was careful to phrase the original question without using the verb "to be", so as to address just the aspect of business acumen.
>As is common, the promoter wound up with the lion's share but my impression is that by himself, nothing much would have happened. - not to say that he was not a significant part, just that he was not alone and the right group happened to be in the right place at the right time.
If you really want phrase it in terms of "had *been*", how about "what if Dennis Ritchie had been Henry Ford?" Ford didn't invent the automobile, and Dennis didn't invent the operating system, but both carried forward the idea in new ways. For that matter, Bill Joy came pretty close to being the Henry Ford of UNIX at one point.
Several people seem to be saying that the skills or proclivity to invent something new and those to deploy the new thing widely are not likely to occur in the same person. That may be true, but it seems that sometimes it does happen. It's true Edison was not Tesla. But I didn't ask what would happen if Dijkstra or Turing had had the business sense of Gates. And Edison did come up with a number of interesting ideas himself, and he was instrumental in getting a lot of them out to the public in forms that would sell.
Microsoft gradually picked up in MS-DOS many features of UNIX that were compatible with its primitive single-process model. Now it's finally picking up multiple processes, because the Internet, among other uses, requires them. Of course, it's doing so mostly by resuscitating a failed competitor to UNIX, namely VMS, in the form of W/NT.
Was there no way that UNIX could have become a mass market item and headed off the brain-dead Microsoft operating systems? What would it take for that to happen now?
There was a problem with early PC hardware that it just wasn't up to running UNIX with decent performance, and that was a big handicap. That handicap mostly doesn't exist now; my experience has been that BSDI or Linux or even Solaris on a current PC gets quite noticeably better performance than Windoze.
Is the real problem that, as someone remarked, Microsoft can't control UNIX the way that it can control MS-DOS, Windows, and W/NT? Does this really mean that a truly open system such as UNIX with multiple developers, owners, and hardware platforms cannot win?
Or is it at least partly simply a case of Gates being more astute in business?
I'd be more interested in discussion of issues such as these (preferably with specific historical notes to illustrate them; Interactive UNIX, XENIX, early Sun, etc., all seem relevant) than getting stuck on simple to be or not to be questions.
Defining history in terms of different computer industries also seems relevant. I remember a lot of people scurrying around trying to either make UNIX run on Intel boxes or to come up with a UNIX hardware platform to compete with Wintel. But was a single hardware platform really the solution? Sure, a PC that wanted to compete as a PC as defined by Microsoft had to run on Intel hardware. But was that the only way to compete? Can such industries be defined solely in terms of hardware? Perhaps we're only now getting to the time of an industry that requires a platform-independent multi-process operating system; maybe UNIX was 25 years early....
It's perhaps also worth mentioning that UNIX hasn't lost: by far most servers on the Internet are UNIX boxes.
Thanks,
John
John S. Quarterman <jsq@mids.org>
Editor, MIDS Internet Weather Report, Matrix Maps Quarterly, and Matrix News President, Matrix Information and Directory Services (MIDS) mids@mids.org, http://www.mids.org, +1-512-451-7602, fax: +1-512-452-0127 1106 Clayton Lane, Suite 500W
Austin, TX 78723
U.S.A.
______________________________________________________________________
