Operating Systems and Computer Hardware

While one can often try to separate these two areas, they are of a necessity related quite strongly to one another. Over the years I have dealt with a number of operating systems, including various DOS derivatives, VMS, Primos, and numerous versions of UN*X, as well as too many hardware platforms to count. On the whole, most hardware platforms are relatively equal, with each having their advantages. Unfortunately, this is not true of operating systems as well. I will say that of them all, UN*X is the best in my view point, with the main areas of lack being:

There is a certain amount of learning that any user must go through to use it. This is a result of its strengths and flexibility.
While there are thousands of programs available in source form from the Internet, most versions of UN*X come with a limited number of programs pre-packaged with the OS distribution.
There are numerous flavours (varieties) of the UN*X operating system (often several for each hardware platform). While there is a large amount of overlap, there are certain areas where one must make minor adjustments when writing or compiling programs.

I could list a number of reasons why I feel that UN*X is superior to any of the others, but it is almost always pointless to do so since most folks (myself included) tend to be rather religious in this area. However, I will say one thing: Don't take the marketing information from Micro$oft (or any company for that matter) on blind faith The NT operating system does not work as well in large installations as the marketing information from Micro$oft claimed, as recently as this past spring. I have personally seen a single processor P90 machine running a version of UN*X (BSD/OS) outperform a dual processor P133 machine running NT 3.51 by at least a margin of 10:1 for nearly identical types of programs (USENET vs. a message forum). Indeed, while at CompuServe, I had these same P90 systems running INN and handle 530 simultaneous users with only 256MB of RAM, while a Compaq Pro-Reliant 5000 with >1GB of RAM and four Pentium Pro 200 processors could only handle 100 users before the BSOD while running IIS on NT 3.51. And this was after extensive tuning by Microsoft themselves!!! NT may be great for a departmental server, but not for an Internet server or a server running a large application such as a database. There are reports from others as well that this holds true in many areas, though to varying margins.

My personal favorite: those based on BSD 4.4 (such as NetBSD or the commercial version which was available from Berkeley Software Design, Inc....It might also explain why I have computers ranging from several Sun 3's (powered off most of the time) and P90's up through AMD Athlon machines running NetBSD.

Here are a few items to think about when selecting an operating system or hardware platform.

Homogeneous solutions for heterogeneous needs almost never work. If you find something which is the perfect solution for everything, buy the company because you are going to make a fortune!
Get the right hardware/software for the task. There is no way I would expect a secretary to be running UN*X (except for possibly a captive package), nor would I expect a large bank to handle all of its transactions on a single P200 running any OS. Of course, choosing to use the same OS on a major server or security critical machine which was used on the secretary's machine is also asking for trouble. If you doubt this just search the web for articles where automated tellers have been infected with viruses.
Remember standards. There are an amazing number of standards out there, and odds are that what you want to do is covered by one or more of them. If you are buying software, make sure what you are buying no only holds to the published standards but also the de-facto standards as well. If you are developing software, not only do you need to remember these same standards, but remember that some groups either desire or require adherence to other standards as well, such as POSIX, ANSI, or the ISO standards (i.e. ISO 9000).
Don't risk your future and the future of your company on blind faith. Marketing information is, by its very nature, slanted to put the vendor's product in a favorable position. If you can, get recommendations from others who are doing the same (or a similar) task (including simultaneous user count). You should get several options together and, above all give them a try to compare them before you make a decision. Most vendors maintain benchmark centers for just this sort of thing.

Last modified on $Date: 2004/03/17 20:59:09 $ by $Author: cinnion $