The subject of Unix on the desktop raised considerable passions at Apple Computer Inc’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference last month. One attendee at the workgroup products session commented It got very heated… there was lots of angry shouting. You would have thought that you had stepped into the Senate. The debate in question, of course, concerned […]
The subject of Unix on the desktop raised considerable passions at Apple Computer Inc’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference last month. One attendee at the workgroup products session commented It got very heated… there was lots of angry shouting. You would have thought that you had stepped into the Senate. The debate in question, of course, concerned the lack of an Apple Unix on the desktop Power Macintoshes. Following a boisterous debate delegates proposed a show of hands to indicate how many of the developers present would want Apple to support desktop Unix. John Conville, who chaired the session and who runs Apple’s server system development programme acknowledges that well over three quarters of those present raised their hands. Conville says he wasn’t overly surpris-ed by the response, but adds this doesn’t answer the business question. As one other Apple user put it if you had asked those guys how many will buy five copies, a lot fewer hands would have gone up. Conville says that word of the response has been relayed to those above him. The official line from Apple is still that the company continues actively to investigate whether Unix on the desktop is commercially viable: it is an on-going investigation says a spokesman. Technically, the implementation for the existing Power Macs would involve Apple in subs-tantial development work. Moving the kernel should not be too difficult, but it is the drivers, the input-output subsystem and other infrastructure that causes the most difficulties. It is possible that the future generations of PCI-based Power Macintoshes will be more amenable to running Apple Unix, but in the meantime the company is still refusing to be pushed into a move it sees as commercially unrewarding.
