All this talk of alien systems invites the question What alien systems? How much longer does IBM see OS1100, Master Control Program, GCOS, NOS/VE, VME, even VAX/VMS being significantly powerful factors in the market that they justify IBM to make investments in developing versions of its software for them – in the Brave New World of open systems, alien systems means nothing more unfriendly than non-IBM Unix systems, and the whole point of Unix is that if you have developed a version of something for your own Unix, most of the hard work has already been done, and creating variants for other vendors’ Unixes should be relatively cheap and simple: at that point whether or not those versions are marketed becomes a political and commercial decision, not a technical or cost-dependent one at all.
