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On 12/02/06 06:42, Chris Bannister wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 03:39:55PM -0800, Francis Healy wrote:
>> The classic definition of the killer app is the one program that justifies
>> the entire cost of the computer.
>
> The only ones I can think of were "Visi Calc" for the Apple II
> and Pagemaker for the Mac.
>
> AFA GNU/Linux is concerned I don't know. Maybe the answer lies in the
> question:
> What was the killer app for Unix?
"Unix" is so broad, running on such a huge range of hardware, and
for 35 years, that asking that is an invalid question.
Text processing (at Bell Labs) was it's original killer app.
Source code was it's next killer "app", since Universities could get
it for a song from AT&T, and teach their CompSci students *much*
cheaper that they could by licensing VAX/VMS and it's source code.
Portability came soon afterwards.
Then came TCP/IP and sendmail and, eventually, NFS.
By the 1980s, "whatever workstation apps that PCs and Macs were too
underpowered to perform".
Graphics was SGI's killer app.
"Cost compared to VAX/VMS" was Sun's killer "app".
And then x86 systems got "fast enough" and along came Windows NT,
which was cheaper than SparcStations and, via Win32, open up a
larger market.
As I see it, the Unix/Linux killer "apps" now are:
- - Size. 16x, 32x & 64x SMP systems powering high TPS systems.
- - Security. Not too many Unix/Linux viruses and botnets floating
around. And there's always OpenBSD.
- - Flexibility. *ix scales from tiny Gumstix up thru 128x Sun
monsters, and from busybox thru KDE/GNOME.
- - Economics. Keep what you have, longer. And Debian &
{Net|Open}BSD let you take your really old PCs and squeeze more
productive work out of them.
- - Low overhead. WinNT can do the same things, but you need to throw
much more hardware and labor at it.
- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
Is "common sense" really valid?
For example, it is "common sense" to white-power racists that
whites are superior to blacks, and that those with brown skins
are mud people.
However, that "common sense" is obviously wrong.
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