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From: atae@spva.ph.ic.ac.uk (Ata Etemadi)
Subject: Ideal Operating System (Was: DEATH BLOW TO UNIX)
Message-ID: <1993Apr15.211054.16274@cc.ic.ac.uk>
Nntp-Posting-Host: prawn.sp.ph
Organization: Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine, London, England
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 21:10:54 BST
Lines: 45

G'Day

Windows NT is a step forward, but not by much. I guess for DOS users who
think multi-tasking is really _neat_ (add puke here) and are overjoyed to 
be able to use more than 64K of memory, its a major improvement. For Windows
users its more like an upgrade with facilities most Unix users take for 
granted. Most of  Windows users only use PCs for text processing or running 
3rd-party applications anyway so the operating system features are not even 
a real issue. My ideal operating system:

	Binary compatible across all plaforms. It should recognize
	binaries and configure on the fly, so I don't have to have
	bin/Mac bin/DOS bin/Dec bin/Sun bin/HP etc...

	Multi-CPU. So I can use the CPUs on my PC and W/S and Mac 
	and Transputers and DSPs. I don't know a single site which 
	has gone for a single vendor. I am not going to trade-in 
	80Mflops per H1 transputer or ultra-fast FFT on DSP chips.
	Note NT runs on Symmetric multi-CPU systems.

	Built-in portable GUI/Graphics tools. You can call DrawButton 
	or DrawLine and it does the same thing no matter what platform 
	or display. It should also translate graphics commands on-the-fly.
	so I can use PC graphics S/W on my workstation and X software on 
 	my PC. I think GUIs are not just nice to have but essential.

	Configurable front-end. So you can make it look like Unix or DOS
	or NT or OS/2, and run shell scripts or command/BAT files.

	Object oriented. So I can program easily under it and not have
	to re-invent the wheel if the networking is not up to scratch
	or my application needs to access source/object code on the fly.

In other words it should have some AI capability. That and a tight, clean
kernel so you can actually understand it. Anyone know of something like this ?

	adios
	     Ata <(|)>.
-- 
| Mail          Dr Ata Etemadi, Blackett Laboratory,                          |
|               Space and Atmospheric Physics Group,                          |
|               Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine,        |
| Internet/Arpanet/Earn/Bitnet atae@spva.ph.ic.ac.uk or ata@c.mssl.ucl.ac.uk  |
| Span                              SPVA::atae       or     MSSLC:atae        |

