Re: Privilege Levels Below User

On Mon, 10 Jun 2024 15:23:51 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:

One other thing they did: they had one PAL code coming with the SRM
console for VMS and Digital OSF/1, and another PAL code with the
ARC/AlphaBIOS console for Windows NT and Linux.  This allowed them to
charge extra (quite a lot) for hardware capable of running their premium
OSs, while providing almost competetive prices for hardware running PC
OSs.

Let me offer an anecdote related (or not?) to this. I had a client with
several DEC Alphas, all running DEC Unix (variously branded “OSF/1” and
“Tru64”). The battery died on one of them, and it came up with a prompt
asking for a Windows NT boot disk.

Both the user and I felt disappointed that a piece of such premium DEC
hardware, when it lost its mind, would default to asking for Windows NT,
of all OSes.

Unfortunately, the PC-like package was still not price/performance
competetive, and AlphaBIOS (which we had on our EV56 boxes) was a horror
to work with.

Windows NT was a disaster to the entire Unix workstation market. The irony
was, NT “Workstation” wasn’t really feature-equivalent to the OSes the
Unix workstations were running. But it was enough for the customers, it
seems ...