Is DEC really positive about moving into open systems, or is it being dragged kicking and screaming by market forces? Despite protestations to the contrary all the evidence would seem to point to the latter conclusion. Indeed, catch Paul Evans, DEC’s group manager for networks marketing, on a good day and he will look you in the eye and say, maybe someone will rewrite Unix and make it a proper operating system. His point being that Unix is a bit flaky because, he argues, it is five years behind leading proprietary operating systems in security and manageability.
Conception
Of course, when it comes to history lessons DEC could claim involvement with Unix from its conception. After all, the operating system was developed by AT&T in 1969 on a PDP-7. This has led DEC to the conclusion that PDP was the mainstay of the Unix system until the release of the VAX architecture in 1977 when Bell Labs put Unix on the VAX. From DEC’s point of view complications set in when AT&T was deregulated, started to market the computers it already manufactured for its own use, and consequently moved the source code for Unix from the VAX to the 3B. There, as far as DEC is concerned, the Unix operating system might have rested in relative obscurity but in the early 1980s, it stepped out of universities and into the commercial world. Users began to put pressure on suppliers to support Unix and in 1984 DEC’s version, Ultrix, appeared. Nowadays DEC makes no secret of the fact that Ultrix has a higher software budget and more engineers working on it than does VMS. In fact to listen to the carefully orchestrated voice of DEC you would think that the promotion of Ultrix was second nature to the company’s employees. Except that even Chris Sarfas, DEC’s Ultrix marketing manager, sees the future in terms of VMS being upgraded into a more open operating system. This is because he feels that DEC’sproprietary technology will always be in advance of standards-based technology. Therefore, as far as DEC is concerned, the sensible thing to do is simply to add standards, as they are agreed, to the company’s proprietary offering. –
The drive for open sys tems has such a head of steam behind it that the the most committed proponents of proprie tary operating systems, IBM and DEC, can no longer afford to stand aloof like lofty Galli os but must get down into the gutter and mix it with the scrappiest of the up-and-coming open systems puppies – hence the RS/6000s and the DECstations. But DEC at least is convin ced that when reality catches up with the open systems faddists, the computing world will begin to look a very different place and VMS will come back into its own. Katy Ring explains.
Indeed, at the recent Paris launch of the fault tolerant VAXft 3000 Model 310 (CI No 1,374), DEC started referring to VMS as an industry-standard operating system. Naturally, as Paul Evans insists, DEC wouldn’t invest millions of dollars in Ultrix if it wasn’t serious about open systems. But he also qualified the statement by adding that DEC doesn’t want the market to swing totally in the direction of Unix. At the end of the day it is the customer that should make the choice to go open or remain proprietary, and his or her decision should fit in with an overall information technology strategy. Evans argues that although Unix is the trendy solution today, customers need to look ahead and think of the practical running of their systems over the next five to 10 years. For example, companies are moving into transaction processing in a big way to fulfil customer demands for instant service, but Unix is not the obvious solution for this type of system functionality. So while governments the world over might be specifying Unix, Evans is confident that the commercial market will never be so Utopian. That is not to say, however, that as far as DEC is concerned companies such as Data General, Wang Laboratories and Prime Computer will ever be anything more than also rans in the proprietary operating systems race for survival.
Nooses
As Evans puts it, the entry stakes are now too h
igh for small companies, which, to be in the same game as the likes of DEC and IBM, need to plough billions of dollars into research and development. But despite the fact that proprietary systems are hanging like nooses around the necks of smaller companies and despite the fact that Unix is exceedingly trendy at the moment, Evans argues that proprietary systems should not be looked down on as bad. After all, he asked with a rhetorical flourish, how long will it take someone to rewrite all those lines of Cobol that run under so many commercial systems? So, as far as DEC is concerned, the future lies with a standards-based VMS operating system which will be proprietary on the inside and standardised on the outside. The user in a multi-vendor world will be able to bolt applications to it but internally it will still be VMS and it will belong to DEC. In other words, it seems probable that DEC believes that it, along with IBM, will ride this Unix storm until it subsides having drowned most of the smaller players. Then, in far calmer waters, a new species of proprietary systems will man the decks.
