At 5:59 PM 7/15/95, Jon Lasser wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jul 1995 an250888@anon.penet.fi wrote:
In addition, now is the time to deploy stego, on a massive scale. How many stego programs have been released for Unix?
Unix? The masses use DOS, Windows, Mac, and OS/2. All you Unix gurus with nifty Unix crypto utilities that PC users can only wonder about need to buy PC's and start porting now if you want to get anywhere.
A legitimate point; however, the majority of PC users won't be in the vanguard of /anything/ -- it's not the nature of the PC industry. If all the Unix folks do it, then the PC folks might.
I disagree with this, depending on what one's interpretation of "vanguard" is, and for what products. For example, I've been a Macintosh user since 1986, despite having worked for Intel for 12 years prior to that. (Actually, I'm a fan of the Mac OS and Way of Doing Things and don't care whether the main microprocessor is Motorola, Intel, or Phlogistonics.) For many years the most interesting--to me--applications came first on the Macintosh, then on the PC, and then only occasionally to Unix machines. Apps like PageMaker, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Fractal Design Painter, Eudora, MORE, and so forth. Things have changed recently, with Windows getting the desirable apps a bit earlier than the Mac version. (The Mac versions of the products above came first becuase of the obvious graphics and user interface consistencies of the Mac, and the user community in prepublication, journalism, and art environments. Writing for DOS in those days was a real lose, because of the lack of a consistent set of standards and toolbox calls...) Only one program I use a lot came first on Unix boxes: FrameMaker. And FrameMaker hit the Mac a few quarters after first appearing on Unix boxes, around 1988 or so. I'm not dismissing Unix boxes or Unix tools...they are obviously very useful for running the Internet and the various tools that access it. Enough said. (And SGI and Sun are doing pretty well. The "vanguard apps" that run on these machines, including the well-known imaging apps, are not things I use.) But I think the point that PCs (and by extension, Macintoshes, which are a flavor of PCs) are never in the vanguard is wrong. By my interpretation of vanguard. (I expect a quibble, this being the Cypherpunks list, about whether Jon meant "the majority of PC users won't be in the vanguard of /anything/ -- it's not the nature of the PC industry" to mean this...) Frankly, Unix fragmented into a bunch of pieces. Maybe it was because of the USL-Novell-AT&T-Sun-Unix International-etc. battles (I don't even recollect who was who in this battle). Maybe it was the News vs. X vs. OpenLook vs. NeXTStep vs. etc. user interface battles. In any case, I expect Windows (and Windows NT) will take an ever-increasing share of the market for at least the next several years. I'm hardly alone in this expectation. --Tim May .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@sensemedia.net | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."