Proprietary, single processor operating systems
offer the greatest potential for close integration of hardware
and software. This occurs with Rhapsody/PowerPC, Macintosh,
Solaris, IRIX, VMS, and OpenVMS.
Proprietary, single processor operating systems
offer the greatest potential for close integration of hardware
and software. This occurs with Rhapsody/PowerPC, Macintosh,
Solaris, IRIX, VMS, and OpenVMS.
Operating systems
that run on a wide variety of processors offer the greatest
variety of machines. This occurs with UNIX (see list in the next
paragraph) and Windows NT.
UNIX systems consist of some common shared ideas
and individual enhancements of UNIX unique to a particular
version of UNIX. UNIX systems include Rhapsody, AIX, BSDI,
Digital UNIX, FreeBSD, GNU Hurd, LINUX, HP-UX, IRIX, NetBSD,
OpenBSD, Pyramid, , Solaris, Sun-OS, and ULTRIX.
There are operating
systems that are single processor but the organization that makes
the operating system is a different organization than the one
that makes the hardware. This occurs with OS/2, Windows 98,
Windows 95, Windows 3.1, MS-DOS, and PC-DOS-2000.
There are operating systems that run on
more than one processor, but on one of the processors, the same
organization makes both the hardware and operating system,
allowing for the possibility of the “best of both
worlds”. This occurs with Rhapsody (Apple-PowerPC), Solaris
(Sun-SPARC), NeXT (NeXT-68040), and BeOS (Be-PowerPC).
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| NeXTCube | BeBox | iMac |
There are operating systems that run
native on one processor but have open system libraries that
allows software developed for the operating system to run on top
of other operating systems. This occurs with Rhapsody Run-Time
Library for Windows.
“You cannot really separate the O/S, from the hardware. You must consider the total solution in product evaluation. IBM, HP, SUN, and the others all have a line of systems spanning single-user machines to systems that handle thousands of users. Factor in various high-availability hardware, binary compatibility among the families, and so on, and you have even more permutations. Add other exotics such as HP’s workstations running a different variant of HP-UX then their servers… and you have a real mess.”
“It is a fact of life that application vendors have first, second, and third tier platforms for the software they write. The differences in bugs, performance, and features/revision levels need to be considered when choosing the HARDWARE platform. Also the same application can run quite differently on different platforms, even though they [the platforms] have the same speeds & feeds on performance. That is because optimization levels differ, and sometimes hardware vendors assist software vendors in tuning applications for their particular environments.” —David A. Lethe
“It takes more than a graphical user interface to make a computer easy to use. It takes tight integration between software and hardware.” — Christian Green
“The Mac is still more elegant and stylish, still more tightly integrated, with better links between software and hardware, because a single company makes both the computer and operating system.” — The Wall Street Journal, July 13, 1995
“Windows 95 is an ‘edifice of bailing wire,chewing gum and prayer.’ ” — The New York Times, August 2, 1995
