Thursday, May 16, 2002
The UNIX argument.
I started getting involved in the technology business back around the turn of the 80's. Of all the countless arguments about technology I remember from that time, one stands out. It was about operating systems. Which was better: UNIX or CP/M? In retrospect, the comparison was ridiculous. It even seemed that way at the time. The guy arguing for UNIX worked at IBM and knew better. The guy arguing for CP/M worked for a computer store -- a rare and special thing in those days -- and didn't know much other than this: CP/M ran on a variety of machines. So did UNIX, of course. That's what the argument was about. If there were a Right Operating System for different machines from different vendors, which would it be?
The perspectives were as different as singular and plural. CP/M was about personal computing. UNIX was about something bigger than that. We called it stuff like "distributed" and "multi-user/multi-tasking". Whatever it was, it wasn't personal, because it only comprehended a connected, networked world.
In a way, that argument is still going on, only now the CP/M side is represented by Windows, which is descended from DOS, which was born as a knock-off of CP/M. The UNIX side is represented by everybody else that still matters: IBM, Sun, HP and a handful of others that now, ironically, includes Apple.
Thanks to the generic put-it-anywhere quality of Linux, plus the fact that it's free building material for all manner of "solutions", the UNIX Way has been steadily broadening out, following Linux' lead.
This became clear to me on Tuesday, when I sat in the audience at Apple, where the company was rolling out its new rack-mounted server, Xserve <http://www.apple.com/xserve/>. Steve Jobs was the master of ceremonies for the two-hour event, which was possibly the least show-biz roll-out Apple has ever done. Sharing the stage with a stack of standard (1U) height boxes in a standard-width cabinet, Jobs could have been Joe Anybody, CEO of YadaTech, showing off Yet Another Box, circa anytime in the last thirty years.
"We're humble," he said. Apple is new to the UNIX enterprise server business. "For every one thing we know, there are ten we don't". He bragged a little when he said "Apple is now the largest UNIX supplier in the world". But that distinction was earned only by selling a large number of small boxes. You're not a real UNIX vendor without a real server, and Apple knows that.
To call Apple a bit late to the party would understate the matter. The company pretty much invented the PC business a quarter century ago, and has since repeatedly failed to offer a serious server product. When an audience member brought up that embarrassing fact, Steve said he wasn't around when most of that stuff happened, and thought of it as "a dream when Apple was in a coma".
Now the company finally offers some serious UNIX boxes. They feature dual 1 GHz PowerPC G4 CPUs, 2MB of Double Data Rate (DDR) L3 cache, up to 2GB DDR SDRAM, four hot-swap ATA/100 drives on a 533MB/s bus, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports... The list goes on.
No server rollout would be complete without a competitive comparison chart, and for that Apple chose servers from Dell, IBM and Sun. Only the IBM and Dell boxes appear price-competitive with the Apple offering ($3,999 for the top model). But that's with all three running a free-as-in-beer OS: Linux on the Dell and the IBM, and OS X on the Apple. When the IBM and Dell boxes run Windows, however, the prices go up by $3,295 for 25 users.
I noticed that Apple didn't seem to be going out of its way to knock its fellow UNIX vendors. Instead the company gave the impression that these new boxes were more likely to join existing server installations than to replace them. That impression was reinforced by Mike Rocha of Oracle, who said his company would be porting and running Oracle 9i on OS X. And it was totally brought home by Russ Daniels of Hewlett-Packard, who said that OpenView, the company's big-time network management system, would not only manage Xservers, but run on them without modification. Later Phil Shiller of Apple showed TurboBLAST, a genetics research application that spreads computational loads across whole farms of UNIX servers.
So there were two messages to take away: 1) Apple is a UNIX company; and 2) UNIX is a camp within which there is far more that unites than divides its variants.
When it was over I went up and asked Steve Jobs if I was right to get the impression that Apple expected Xservers to be new crops in existing server farms, rather than replacements for existing crops of servers. He said yes. When I asked him to name the kinds of servers he expected to see running alongside Xservers, he started his list with Linux.
It's clear now that Linux has commodified the operating system. Members of the UNIX camp all know that now. And maybe that knowledge is what Linus Torvalds anticipated when he talked about World Domination.