The results of an informal survey, effectively a random sampling of The Net, conducted last month by an Acer Inc engineer on his own – from his own micro from his own home and having nothing official to do with his company – on the question of what operating system should be on MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC-based Advanced Computing Environment boxes, has apparently started some people thinking. Of the 148 respondants, 46% of them – by far the largest population – voted for Unix System V.4. The Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Open Desktop, the official operating system, managed to garner only an appallingly low 5%. If you add those that voted for Berkeley System Distribution without reckoning that V.4 incorporates most of Berkeley, it would have been a System V.4 landslide – 66%. Add another 4% representing those that voted for SunOs on the basis that the next release from Sun Microsystems is System V.4. Applying a similar principle of course, you could add the 14% who voted for OSF/1 to the Santa Cruz Operation’s score on the grounds that the new Open Desktop will be based on Digital Equipment Corp’s version of OSF/1, but that was still only 19%. The voters were all identified and even when you discount the obvious bias votes – though with all the various agendas flying that might mean disenfranchising everyone – System V.4 was still out ahead.
