The OS wars and DOOM...

This is a point I want to bring up regarding the current
OS war being waged on this group.

Apps have migrated from Unix to the Mac and the PC before in
the past. In the further past, this has included curses and
other-types-of-text-control packages such as PC versions of
Emacs and nethack and the like.

Of course, this was not done with graphical programs; everyone knows
that graphics isn't Unix's strong suit, and what it has is so different
from the PC, etc., blah, blah,...

Except that for the past two or three years, it's been WRONG.

One of the hottest games on the PC, DOOM, was originally written in
Nextstep (a Unix variant, and a ghetto even amidst the "ghetto" of
Unix) and then ported to the PC.

I don't know which Unix environment they're using in the "master"
development effort before porting to other environments today.

Given that games usually program close to the hardware, and are 
therefore the _most_ difficult things to port from one environment
to another, it really makes one wonder why Excel isn't out for
(for example) Linux or BSD today.

Then again, SCO WordPerfect is...

Phil

On Fri, 21 Jul 1995, Phil Fraering wrote:

> 
> This is a point I want to bring up regarding the current
> OS war being waged on this group.
> 
> Apps have migrated from Unix to the Mac and the PC before in
> the past. In the further past, this has included curses and
> other-types-of-text-control packages such as PC versions of
> Emacs and nethack and the like.
> 
> Of course, this was not done with graphical programs; everyone knows
> that graphics isn't Unix's strong suit, and what it has is so different
> from the PC, etc., blah, blah,...
> 
> Except that for the past two or three years, it's been WRONG.
> 
> One of the hottest games on the PC, DOOM, was originally written in
> Nextstep (a Unix variant, and a ghetto even amidst the "ghetto" of
> Unix) and then ported to the PC.

Very good example ... I think you will find that many programs are 
physcially coded on a unix box and crossed compiled using something
like gcc or g++. One of the last steps is add the gui interface if 
required, compile on the native target platform using the compiler of
choice for that target. 

I have a friend who is coding an OS/2 project and using AIX as the 
development platform. The project started by downloading some source
code for a unix platform that essentially performed the desired task
studying it and modeling their code  after the source code off the net.
Why reinvent the wheel ?

> I don't know which Unix environment they're using in the "master"
> development effort before porting to other environments today.
> 
> Given that games usually program close to the hardware, and are 
> therefore the _most_ difficult things to port from one environment
> to another, it really makes one wonder why Excel isn't out for
> (for example) Linux or BSD today.

Very true of games and that is one of the reasons DOS is a popular
platform for games ... direct hardware control is possible and the
hardware architecture is only INTEL x86 ... although the technology 
is evolving beyond this point rapidly. Another reason for the large 
game market with DOS machines is simply the huge home market where 
DOS is the undisputed leader. 


-Mike

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Phil Fraering writes:
    Given that games usually program close to the hardware, and are 
    therefore the _most_ difficult things to port from one environment
    to another, it really makes one wonder why Excel isn't out for
    (for example) Linux or BSD today.

Microsoft has lots to lose from making software available to systems
that "comptete" with MS-DOG and Windoze.  It's clearly in their best
interests to not make their software run under Unix and/or X11
(although WABI has some interesting implications in that regard).

On the other hand, that would seem to imply that it's in a lot of
other people's interest to port their software -- every little bit of
leverage against Microsoft helps.