Unix was being heavily plugged at the recent Seybold Desktop Publishing Conference in Santa Clara, California by such luminaries as Scott McNealy from Sun Microsystems, Steve Jobs from Next Inc, and John Warnock from Adobe Systems, according to Microbytes Daily. According to Jobs, Unix version wars are both irrelevant and inconsequential in comparison with those […]
Unix was being heavily plugged at the recent Seybold Desktop Publishing Conference in Santa Clara, California by such luminaries as Scott McNealy from Sun Microsystems, Steve Jobs from Next Inc, and John Warnock from Adobe Systems, according to Microbytes Daily. According to Jobs, Unix version wars are both irrelevant and inconsequential in comparison with those between MS-DOS and the Macintosh, or even MS-DOS and OS/2. The fact that it’s at least Unix gets you 95% of the way, said Jobs, who suggested that Unix lacked only a good graphical interface and hardware cheap enough to compete with low-cost personal computers. Sun’s McNealy said that Sun would be ready with a low-cost Sparc-based personal copmputer by next summer, and claimed that Sparc clones will soon begin to emerge from Taiwan although there has been some back-peddling from Sun on this since the event, with the company now indicating that it knows lots of companies are developing Sparc-based products that will be priced against high-performance personal computers, but that it does not itself intend to enter the personal computer market. Steve Jobs’ Next machine is due to be announced tomorrow, and should add to the contenders for the user interface race. But, as Jobs pointed out, both Unix and Display Postscript, the basis for the Next Inc interface and Digital’s DECWindows interface, require large amounts of memory to run, and machines properly equipped to run them could add an extra $2,000 to the cost in comparison to Macintosh and MS-DOS rivals. The sluggish performance of the graphics on the Next workstation have been rumoured to be the main cause for its long-delayed introduction. But, says Jobs, the alternative is throwing away all of your present computers in 24 months.
