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 ************************************************************************** * Mike Bailey (hm)214-252-3915 * * AT&T Capital Corporation. (wk)214-456-4510 * * email bailey@computek.net host bambam.computek.net * * "Remember you can tune a piano but you can't tuna fish -Joe Walsh" * * http://www.computek.net/public/bailey * **************************************************************************