Of course, there is the option that IBM chose which is to embrace a
mainframe o/s (VM), a mid-range business solution (OS/400), and the AIX
flavors...
It seems to be a pretty effective strategy for Big Blue...
jack
-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Mark Landin
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 2:51 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] MPE strengths (was: Return Codes from
CREATEPROCESS
On 6/26/08, Chuck Ryan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Jeff Kell
> Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 10:50 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: MPE strengths (was: Return Codes from CREATEPROCESS
>
> Peter M. Eggers wrote:
> > My feeling is that all of that "newfangled technology" should be
> > hidden away from the application programmer as it can only lead to
> > distractions from solving the business information at hand. I also
> > believe that adding/exposing the Posix interface was a mistake, but
> > that subject reminds me of a number of other sore points, so I will
> > stop there before I go off on OpenMPE or something.
> >
>
> I have often wondered why HP did not try and go the other way, add an
> MPE personality to HPUX as opposed to adding Posix to MPE, and
> effectively move their entire MPE user base to HPUX via OS upgrades +
> the MPE-->HPUX conversion kits as opposed to doing their best to push
> everyone off a cliff?
Marketing and mindshare. With UNIX, you had Sun, IBM, HP, and others
touting UNIX as a great OS for business. Once any one of those companies
convinced a buyer that UNIX was a good choice, all three major flavors
from those vendors had a fighting chance at a sale, so there was a good
deal of cross-marketing going on. Further, even if someone did choise,
say, IBM's UNIX servers, 4 years down the road HP might be able to get
that customer to transition to HP-UX on HP servers.
HP would have had to bow out of that entire cross-bred arrangment as
their HP-UX became less and less like UNIX and more and more like MPE.
Further, convincing vendors to rewrite their software to act more
MPE-like instead of UNIX-like would have been a very difficult
proposition. Once a vendor has an AIX version of their package, porting
it to SunOS and HP-UX is a lot easier than porting to something like
MPE.
And if vendors didn't rewrite their code to be more MPE-like, then
customers wouldn't be using the MPE-like features, and would wonder why,
if they were just using UNIX features, they couldn't use IBM's UNIX,
etc. As you deprecated and removed UNIX features that conflicted with
MPE features, you would alienate more and more customers who would be
more likely to switch to SunOS or AIX than switch to the more unfamiliar
(and thus more risky) MPE-like OS.
Lastly, MPE just isn't strong in some of the things UNIX is good at, as
others have already pointed out. Think about how disruptive adding the
POSIX and UNIX-like networking capabilities were to early versions of
MPE. Didn't you feel like MPE's reliability took a step backwards in
that time? Didn't you feel like there were more system aborts in those
days? And wasn't it almost always networking stuff that came in from the
POSIX port? The MPE-POSIX relationship was always a strained one.
--
"If hard work were such a wonderful thing, you'd think rich people would
have kept it all for themselves" - Lane Kirkland
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