On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Kapil Hari Paranjape<[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > The reasons you have given are reasonable for: > (a) Organisations/people who were newbies in the 90's
Newbies or not, the world was moving towards a GUI based OS and Unix fell woefully short there apart from not having desktop packages (WYSIWYG). Unix remained a server operating system. It did have some good GUI roots in Workstations. However, these were again tied to hardware and developed by companies like Apollo and Sun. These not being free of hardware was a distinct block to adoption wholesale. IBM had thrown open hardware and PC compatibles market flourished. No Unix on any one of them as the HW/SW markets were separated and commoditised. At one level, this commoditisation did save costs as compared to erstwhile proprietary systems. Again, like I said earlier, this does not mean India could not have spawned a whole new Unix based desktop generation. Could've done so eminently. India did not believe in itself enough. We were content to follow than to lead. > (b) Business organisations/people (who _must_ follow the market). > > This still does not explain why the organisations that had competence > in Unix allowed this competence to lapse (for example, by "forgetting" > to pass it on to the younger generation). Moreover, it looks like > academic organisations are following business trends rather than > leading businesses to future trends. Academia is not to blame. It is again the policymakers. One good example is the syllabus specification that has been discussed. Another good example is NIC. In the 80s, this body adopted Xenix (MS's early roots in Govt) for its deployments with an accent on smaller 4/5 terminal PC based hardware. If it had chosen Unix and specified PCs as the hardware platform, industry would've risen to the occasion like they did in 1985. -- Mohan Sundaram _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [email protected] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
