Re: Research questions WRT SCO's complaint

on Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 03:45:55PM -0800, DV Henkel-Wallace ([email protected]) wrote:
> On Saturday, Mar 8, 2003, at 15:06 America/Los_Angeles, Karsten M. Self 
> wrote:
> >
> >on Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 02:14:14PM -0800, DV Henkel-Wallace 

<...>

> >What I'm trying to refute (from several directions) is SCO's claim 
> >that:
> >
> >    (Paragraph 82)
> >    Virtually none of these software developers and hobbyists had
> >    access to enterprise-scale equipment and testing facilities for
> >    GNU/Linux development.
> >
> >Direction 1 is clearly to demonstrate that these "hobbyists" had
> >access to enterprise-scale equipment and testing facilities (often
> >masquerading as, at your option, Univresity labs, and the whole
> >fscking Internet).
> >
> >Direction 2 is to point out that many of the better bits of Unix came
> >from a markedly similar environment:  LSD, er, UCD, in the 1970s.
> 
> I don't know how much "unixness" (fork, suid, no revisons in the FS, 
> etc) matters; we didn't do this sort of development at Cygnus.
> 
> We had access to Cray and SGI hardware from the get go with our first 
> customer, NASA.  Michael developed g++ on Sun workstations at MCC, 
> Stanford and later Sun (remember, these were 68K sun workstations).  
> However, despite these being "enterprise class" as the term was 
> probably known at the time, I don't think that helps much.
> 
> As far as testing goes we had lots of gear at various times over the 
> years: Suns of all sorts, HP, IBM, SGI...Sconix was one of the few we 
> rarely encountered.
> 
> The Hurd, and most of the initial other GNU development done at MIT was 
> done on a TI nu machine.  That was an enterprise workstation too.
> 
> Better to focus on the Vax: that was an "enterprise" machine.  At MIT, 
> because of how we worked, there was only one vax in the AI lab, and 
> nobody used it (even it's name, prep, was an obscure joke).  It was 
> only a 750, but that might be good enough for your purposes.  RMS used 
> it because nobody else wanted it (the rest of us used "real machines" 
> like PDP-10s and lispms.  There were other vaxes at MIT of course).  At 
> UCB the vax was the machine of choice and there were lots of them, 
> including the biggies.  I first installed a BSD distribution on a Vax 
> 11/780 in 1982 in Paris.

Excellent.

Mind if I quote this?

> >>> - Unix marketshare.  Does anyone have values for breakdown of
> >>>   marketshare through the 1990s of the major Unix flavors?  My
> >>>   understanding is that SCO was never much more than a bit player in
> >>>   the x86 market.  Possibly a fair number of deployments, but low
> >>>   overall valuation.
> >>
> >>Any of the usuals (Gartner, etc) can give you these numbers as well as
> >>the magazines (Unix Toady etc) since they were eagerly followed by the
> >>kinds of people who cared about these sort of things.  A corporate
> >>library may have a collection of the trade rags.
> >
> >Little access to any of these ATM.  I've been able to dig some
> >rudimentary stats via Google searches.  Anyone who can assist, again,
> >this is appreciated.
> 
> Remember that this all predates the commercial use of the Internet, so 
> you have to go to dead trees.

What!  There was life before the Internet?

Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <[email protected]>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    The truth behind the H-1B IT indentured servant scam:
    http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html