🚀 go-pugleaf

William Taylor wrote:
> 
> In article <dke-2303960719590001@adnline15.adnc.com> David K. Every,
> dke@adnc.com writes:
> >Sadly NT is doing a better job of creating a good enough design for doing
> >engineering and data acquisition, serving, etc... and has a better unified
> >interface... and feels more consistant from variant to variant... AND has
> >a marketing behemoth behind it. 

This is completely WRONG.  NT's a poor chocie for Engineering and I know
first hand that OS/2 is replacing DOS/WFWG as an Engineeing platform for
data aquisition.

NT cannot be run without the UI while OS/2 can be run in character mode.
OS/2 is a far lighter and easier to embed OS.  (That's why OS/2 is used 
for ATMs and in stores for mmedia terminals).  

OS/2 runs on laptops with less power drain than NT!!!!
This is hugely critical to us scientist and engineers!!

For instrumentation, OS/2 can replace 3 DOS laptops with 
one premeptively multitasking OS/2 laptop.  It's better than 
legacy systems based on DOS and is fully functional in 4 MB of RAM.

The US Govt's research labs have adoped OS/2 and have freeware 
OS/2 software to allow for the use of OS/2 in the field for 
monitoring instruments.

Locally NASA's got some researchers doing AI embedding and the
OS they run is OS/2.  NT's horribly suited for this and WIn95 was
tried and dropped because it's not a robust multi-tasking OS.


> >While I doubt that will displace Unix in
> >higher-ed, and many labs where everyone comes from higher-ed (unless MS
> >starting GIVING it to them) - it does seem to make a dent in the server
> >market, and likely will continue to do so.
> 
> I like NT a lot, but I have a hard time justifying it for my mission
> critical servers for several reasons: 1) Unix offers higher performance
> hardware and peripherals than the average PC server. 2) In my experience
> risc servers are more reliable 3) from an admin point of view they are
> easier for me to manage remotely.

NT's good for people who want a MS based OS running MS's software and 
standards.  If you add one non-MS OS you have problems.  For this reason
I think the predicted NT revolution will never happen.  The world is
too diverse in computing needs and thus any system that requires 3rd
party support to integrate will be deselected by market forces.
 
> For the most part, I have found PC's to be generally not of the best
> quality compared to other computers.

When you pay WORKSTATION PRICE you can get good quality however as
we advance in our comptuing power our needs advance just as fast.
Today's PC is still too weak to replace a workstation and will never
keep pace with the quality and performance a workstation user needs.
I agree with you.

I'd be glad to compete with any NT user using my OS/2 and UNIX  
systems. 

-- Dr. Joseph C. Coughlan, jcoughlan@gaia.arc.nasa.gov