Re: [aclug-L] Smart Cars

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jan 14, 1999 at 06:12:11PM -0600, Bob Deep wrote:

> Ahhh, but one slight rub.

Of course. :-)

> The success of linux, is in some strang way related to the success of
> Microsoft.  Without MS's serious control of the computing hardware
> market, and the standardization of the Personal Computer hardware, the

Unfortunately, there isn't really any standardization of PC hardware.  There
is no standard for video cards (only for their output).  PCI itself has
several flavors.  We have IDE, EIDE, UDMA, SCSI, SCSI-UW, SCSI-U2W, etc.

> bulk of linux's current users and developers would still be in the dark
> ages (ie B.P.C).  Linux then benifits from a standard and stable

Unix existed long before the PC.  Frankly, I would rather have seen OS/2 win
out if the choice is between OS/2 and Windows.  Had the Internet
infrastructure existed to its present extent back when the 386 came out,
Linux would have been viable back then already.

> hardware platform that's cheep and reliable. (Yes, it runs on various
> platforms, but the bulk of development is being done on PC's).  It is

This I must take issue with.  While it may be true that the majority of
people running Linux do so on x86 hardware (note I avoid "PC" since it is
ambiguous here), it is not true that other platforms are not as
well-supported.  Alpha, Sparc, UltraSparc, m68k, etc. are among the
well-supported versions as well.  Thanks to free software, even if the
software developer is using x86, all it takes is a recompile and things work
fine on my Alpha.

I'm sitting at my Alpha machine now, running mutt (and typing my message in
emacs) in an xterm in 2.2.0pre5 with Afterstep as my window manager.  It
seems exactly like an Intel machine, except a lot faster.

> the availablity of the hardware that makes linux as successful as it is,
> and we owe a lot of thanks to the M$oft/Intel pair for the situation we
> find our selves in.

Well again, the benefits of mass production certainly have done a lot for
computing and for Linux, but I see no reason that it would have had to be
Microsoft and Intel driving that.  Digital could have, had they not missed
the ball with PCs.  IBM could have, too, had they done a better job with
OS/2, or done a better job with the PC architecture.  Apple could have, had
they done a better job with their OS.

The rest of your post, I mostly agree with.
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