Re: AdaOS

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

I wonder why that was? It seems to me that a portable operating system that
ran on a variety of hardware would be a *good* thing for business. (Some
businesses.) What got in the way of - say - making it work on a Sun?

A portable operating system with a portable language ought to be good for
someone who is marketing software, don't you think? Write-once,
Compile-many? But then, if that were true, Ada with an Ada OS ought to be a
marketable concept - yet it doesn't seem to gain much traction? What is the
downside?

Possibly that other players would then be able to easily develop to the same
platforms and a Really Big Software Business might want to make it hard for
other players to do ports to all kinds of hardware? (They, having more
resources, might have an advantage trying to port to a dozen platforms while
a small company might not.)  Still doesn't seem to add up, given that I
don't know that Microsoft is seriously playing in the Sun/Sparc arena, for
example, so why try to keep small competitors out? And making your OS work
on Sun hardware seems to just make an inroad into new business.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Ted Dennison" <dennison@telepath.com> wrote in message
news:mWVH7.22092$xS6.34190@www.newsranger.com...
>
> The device drivers and the NT kernel both. I think they went with that
design
> because they were initially planning on porting NT to a great number of
> platforms, and they didn't want to have to make changes all over the OS
every
> time that was done. However, they only ever had ports for 3 platforms, and
they
> soon dropped one of those.