At 12:45 PM 10/20/96 -0700, Stan Sieler wrote:
>Lance writes:
>
>> You MPE diehards just don't know what you're missing by sticking
>> with a STABLE but old, frumpy, feature deficient O/S like MPE!
>
>Actually, Lance makes the same mistake many people make: confusing
>the Unix *OPERATING SYSTEM* with the Unix environment.
>
>Yes, as an environment, Unix generally comes with many more free
>utilities than MPE.
>
>But, as an *OPERATING SYSTEM*, Unix is the one that's lacking.  Sorry,
>but it's simple, easily demonstrable fact.  However, Unix has been
>improving in recent years, and is beginning to gain features once found
>only in high end operating systems.

Clearly Lance must be relatively 'new' as he doesn't appear to know much in
terms of the origin of a number of technology advances.  Perhaps he is truely
the 'bigot' as he has termed many of us MPE'ers, for most all of us do
credit the source of things which have been adopted by MPE over the years.
(Remember which PC offered 3.5 disc first...? Remember the mainframe based
spread-sheet software before PCs became common place and PC-based packages
(i.e. Lotus) took off?)

Apparently UNIX was the beginning (and limit) of his universe.  As he
doesn't realize that many of the things which UNIX the *operating system* is
just now providing in order to break out of an engineering/educational
environments into business computing have been around for 20-25 years in
such operating systems such as TOPS-10, JES2/3, CICS, Boroughs (as Stan
reminds us), MVS, VM,
MPE(circa '74) and so forth.

Perhaps it was the first OS he 'cut his teeth on', and hence, his bias.  On
the other hand, his bias may also be preventing him from looking at problems
in a different way and learning about different technology and gaining a
broader perspective on computing technology...

Sure, UNIX offers other types of innovations, but let's not lose site that
the real goal is meeting business needs, hence the $$$ to invest in
technology.  I've not yet seen a situation whereby UNIX has replaced large
corporate MVS systems (2,000+ concurrent on-line users, not to mention
countless batch job queues), but MPE has... :)


/jf