IBM's mini computerslack thereof 833

Go see what IBM, SGI, HP (including what is left of DEC) and others have been doing lately. Linux has made a great leap forward from being a mee-too os to a real contender to fame. It seems like just a version change from 2.4 to 2.6, but it is all there. Very good SMP, disc scalability, around 8500 hardware drivers, all of a consistently good quality, support for journalling file systems and databases.

Well, for the short while. For the long while you want ownership to be public so noone can hijack the standard.

The IBM PC designers just threw something together on a low budget, just like the rest of us. The real design came later. ST506 was just a design that was adequate at the time.

As long as you are streaming data in large chunks both disk, tape and network I-O is up to it.

DECnet was a croc. Noone uses that as an example. The only compunent that survived was the ethernet.

Wouldn't that be like a QNX system? QNX has existed since 1982, at least.

Unix has changed a lot. What looks like unix today is a lot different internally. Lots of ideas from Tops20, Multics, QNX, Gnu, Solaris, AIX and the 370 series have found their way into Linux and BSD. Linux internals is pretty far from standard Unix internals these days.

There are also at least four code paths that are pretty distinct, in that there is almost no common code, but remain compliant to a source code standard. Everyone but Microsoft seem to enforce such standards pretty stringently.

Face it Barb, the current *n*x OSes are pretty close to what you want, and oodles more.

Time to take a look at it?

-- mrr