Sidebar -- OSs
By Donald Jenner

One of the most confusing issues in the purchase process is the choice of operating systems. Proprietary OSs are pretty much a thing of the past; Unix is still around, but it has been losing pride-of-place for technical workstations for several years.  The hot operating system for the hot new workstations is Microsoft's Windows NT.  

Now up to version 3.5 (and another rev is in the pipeline), WinNT is a serious high-end operating system built from the ground up to support 1990s computing.  After a somewhat slow start, WinNT has matured into a power-user tool.

WinNT comes in two flavors: The client version is used on workstations and stand-alone systems. Server edition has a number of modifications and administrative tools for use on a network backend system.  Both versions are scalable in a number of ways; the most important for CAD users is the ability to support symetrical multiprocessing -- splitting tasks across more than one processor in the workstation.  This is a 32-bit operating system, well able to take advantage of current hardware architectures; because of its modular design, it should be fairly simple to re-tool the heart of the system for hardware with greater ability as it comes along (and 64-bit processing is not far away).

The upside to WinNT as an operating environment is its Windows look-and-feel.  The v3.5 interface is virtually identical to that of Win3.1; the next rev will adopt the new Win95 interface.  This is not simply a slapped-on-top GUI; the interface is to some extent integral to the whole system.

On the downside, even Microsoft folks will tell you that only a techy could love installing WinNT.  Moreover, though common Windows apps will, by and large, run under WinNT, they run poorly; this means securing native-NT versions of software at smaller-market prices -- at least, until Microsoft's cunning plan takes effect.

The cunning plan, of course, has to do with Win95.  Microsoft played to its strength -- end-user marketing -- and made an end-run around the corporate MIS crowd last March.  They sent out a fairly stable beta in March (good enough for the office-automation types, but a problem on heavily configured systems in some cases); they followed that up in June with a later beta that is good enough use in a production environment (I am running it as I write this, and I am a bigtime convert).  Microsoft will not award its seal of approval to any Win95 application, unless it also runs on WinNT.

This means several things for graphics-intensive CAD users.  First, the NT users will begin to get popularly priced applications that should work at least on some WinNT systems.  It also means that smaller shops can consider the option of using upper-end commodity systems offering performance close to "workstation" levels and running a real off-the-shelf OS.  A good selection of capable drawing and designing packages, tuned to Win95/WinNT on Intel-based systems, will appear within months of the Win95 roll-out.

The other new workstation-class OS is -- not surprisingly -- Apple's latest MacOS.  No longer dubbed "System X", this is, nevertheless, System 7.5.2.  It sports support for the new features of the PowerMac 9500 series of machines, such as PCI-buss based devices and the latest PowerPC 604 processor.  This newest version of Mac

According to Apple, the new OS fully supports virtually all older MacApps as well native PowerPC apps; users can keep their investment in some less critical software applications, while moving deliberately to the latest PowerPC versions of applications important to getting business done.  Since these are clearly workstation-class machinese -- both in power and in price, this is a combination meriting serious consideration.

Where does that leave Unix, previously the standard operating system for workstations?  It's still around -- mostly as a full-service alternative.  For example, IBM's PowerPC-based systems can run the company's very well received AIX.  Intel-based systems can easily run an advanced Unix from SCO.  Sun workstations come with that company's high-customized Unix, and the same is true for workstations produced by Silicon Graphics and Digital Equipment Corp..  In each case, the common Unix foundation has been substantially tuned to the specific markets for which the company is aiming its Unix-equipped products.

The odd man out at this point appears to be OS/2, IBM's operating system currently fielded only for Intel-based systems but promised for that company's PowerPC systems at sometime in the future.  The problem with OS/2 is not what it does, so much as what it doesn't do -- namely, run a large number of applications.  While a core of apps is a available, most OS/2 users need to run products planned for other OS foundations, commonly those for Windows.  IBM has tacitly admitted this, by building Windows-software support into OS/2.  This compatibility is limited, and likely to become more so, to the extent Win95 and WinNT mark Microsoft's tangential road away from the common ground once shared with IBM.

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