“Maj. Gen. Dale Meyerrose, CIO and director of architecture and
integration for the U.S. Northern Command at Peterson Air Force
Base in Colorado, was this morning’s opening speaker here at the
Storage Networking World conference…“You said in your presentation that you see Unix as the
‘Betamax of software.’ Does that mean it has no place in your IT
environment? It currently has a place, and in fact we do
use Unix on several of the DOD systems. My thought behind Unix is
the march of technology is what has made Unix less and less
relevant. The Y2k rollover, in fact, killed lots of Unix. There are
a finite number of Unix engineers and software writers in the
world, and it is not big enough to support the information
technology demands not only of our society, but of the world’s
economies in general. It costs a lot to train somebody; it takes
many years to get them educated. It takes even more for them to get
experience so that you can use them, when in fact a lot of software
engineering and design is a lot less complicated and in my view
will outpace Unix…”