On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 7:42 PM, Sivasankar Chander<[email protected]> wrote: > > The domestic UNIX vendors (HCL, DCM, Wipro, SunRay, > OMC, etc.) remained content with time-shared text-mode > CLIs on serial terminals (VT100 clones).
A man of my times, I see. Sunray and Godrej were the giveaway. Not many know Sunray nowadays. They had some decent workstations albeit high priced with almost no software. Mosr GUI based vendors were locked to proprietary hardware instead of adopting PC hardware. We are echoing the same thing here. The market or policy did not push these vendors to bring out low cost Unix based desktops. >> 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. >> >> NIC is not to blame - their choice of Xenix and other UNIX flavours > was sound . There were local vendors (HCL, DCM, etc.) that offered > System V on x86 - but they were servers as discussed earlier. This where we differ in viewpoints. I'm not debating the soundness of the decision. It was a failsafe option but not path breaking. A body like NIC could've pushed industry for Unix on the low cost desktop server with a Multi IO card - the market that Xenix and later SCO Unix targetted. We had some good software from companies like Vishesh for office use. This route was not taken. NIC was developing its own software and did not need these office packages in any case. However, it could've played its part in pushing industry. In my opinion, this was an inflexion point which could've been seized.. It was also the time of liberalisation Rajiv Gandhi era and winds did blow in the direction of import rather than develop across many industries. I'd like to draw the example of the Auto industry here. It went the same way and all design was shelved for about 4 years from 1991-95. The industry used this to leapfrog generations and then went back to design from a higher threshold. This did not happen in the software world then. We had leapfrogged with Unix adoption. I believe we should've persisted and built around it. -- 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
