Linux at 17 What Windows promised to be
- From: Chance Furlong <t-bone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2008 21:46:31 -0500
From The Register:
http://tinyurl.com/4y5g29
Cuss and discuss, Windroids.
Linux at 17 What Windows promised to be
You can't stop the port
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Posted in Operating Systems, 9th October 2008 17:20 GMT
On October 5, 1991, the young man who would one day become the world's
most famous programmer, and the brand name and poster boy for the open
source software movement, sent a message to a newsgroup announcing the
birth of what would become the Linux operating system.
You can read that original message that marks the birth of Linux as an
open source project, posted by Linus Benedict Torvalds, on Google's
archive of a newsgroup called comp.os.minix
It is hard to guess how many programmers and system administrators have
been educated by the Linux development project, but it forms the core of
what so many experts and newbies believe in terms of what an operating
system should have in it, how that code is created, and how the systems
software stack that rides atop of it is created and maintained.
It is safe to say that many millions of IT experts have been affected,
either directly or indirectly, by Linux and the open source software
movement it unleashed on corporations. While academic and government
institutions had long since supported open source software projects as
well as the Unix open systems movement, it is Linux, first and foremost,
that made open source a commercial idea and one that corporations could
embrace.
Linux has come a long way in those intervening 17 years, which are a bit
like dog years with respect to how computer technology (both hardware
and software) moves at an accelerated pace compared to other
technologies and areas of the economy. It is hard to say if Linux is
middle-aged or not, since the successors to OS/360 are still around more
than four decades later (in actual time), and the original Unix is
almost as old.
Even the commercial implementations of Unix are three decades old, and
commercial Windows servers became a reality in 1994, more than 14 years
ago. Who is to say how long any of these platforms will be around in
production environments, but the history of the computer industry
suggests that legacy platforms linger longer than many expect but lose
their potency in the market ahead of when many might have hoped. In many
companies these days, the only two alternatives are Linux and Windows
for new applications, and some day, far into the future that is hard to
conceive, these will be legacy platforms too.
What Windows Promised to Be
But it's remarkable that an open source movement backed by a handful of
commercial entities with very little marketing muscle, at least compared
to the established proprietary and Unix operating system providers who
made so much money in the 1980s and 1990s, could take on the data center
and, more importantly, get the begrudging support of the very system
sellers who had the most to lose if Linux took off. This is a testament
to the powerful idea of a cross platform, open source operating system.
Linux is what Unix should have been and wasn't.
Linux is what Windows had once promised to be, at least in terms of
cross-platform support. In the wake of the PowerPC alliance from IBM,
Apple, and Motorola in 1991, Microsoft made a commitment to support
Windows NT 3.51 on PowerPC chips. Windows eventually added support for
Digital's Alpha NEC's and SGI's MIPS chips. Workstation maker Intergraph
ported Windows NT 3.51 to its Clipper chips and said it was creating a
port to Sparc chips from Sun. Neither ports saw the light of day.
Windows NT 4.0, which came out in 1996, only supported nothing more than
f32 bit x86, Alpha, and MIPS chips, and by the turn of the millennium,
only x86 chips were supported. (Interestingly, the PowerPC alliance also
lined up IBM's OS/2 and AIX Unixes - the OS/2 was never delivered - and
even Sun Microsystems' SunOS Unix was slated for the PowerPC chips. IBM
also ported its OS/400 minicomputer operating system to the 64 bit
variants of PowerPC).
While Microsoft has expanded support to cover Itanium processors -
mostly at the urging of Hewlett-Packard, Intel's Itanium development
partner and the one with the most to gain from Windows on Itanium for
its high-end Integrity servers, Microsoft has not made good on the
initial cross-platform promises for Windows server. Microsoft has
suffered from this, but not as much as Intel has been helped.
The beauty of Linux is this: You can't stop a port to a new
architecture, even if you wanted to.
Making Megakat City safer one troll at a time.
.
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