Recent Updates to this ArticleSat Aug 7 18:36:31 CDT 1999 Added link to the Indonesian Translation of the article. Sun Apr 25 22:29:27 CDT 1999
Added Warren Young's feedback Interesting BSOD Story and More NT vs. Unix observations. Added following to the "Related Links" section: HP Delivers 24x7 Worldwide Support For Linux Systems and Applications Fixed the following broken link in the "Related Links" section: OnSite - Case Study: Migration Migraines Updated the following link in the "Related Links" section: Case Study: Horns of a Dilemma Thu Apr 22 00:00:02 CDT 1999
Changed following sentence in the fourth paragraph of the "Executive Summary": Old:The aim of this article is to give you these facts, and prove that they are facts, because facts are not debatable.New:The aim of this article is to give you the resources which will enable you to make thoughtful and informed decisions regarding your organization's IT planning and operations. Added following to the "Related Links" section:
Added Marty Cawthon to the "Acknowledgments" section. Tue Mar 23 21:13:44 CST 1999
Added following to the "Related Links" section: Divorcing Thin Server Software from the Hardware Wed Mar 17 09:47:23 CST 1999
Added following to the "Related Links" section: IACT's 24x7 Report Tue Feb 16 03:14:31 CST 1999
Added following to the "Related Links" section: IBM to Linux-ize PCs Added following to the "What are Major Companies Deploying?" section: See also Web Servers of 101 Prominent Companies/Organizations. Mon Feb 8 21:54:09 CST 1999
Added following to the "Performance" section: If high performance Windows file sharing is of utmost importance, then one should consider choosing a server configuration that has broken the world speed record for such services, an SGI machine running IRIX:"Samba 2.0 has been benchmarked using the Ziff-Davis NetBench (R) benchmarking suite, as the world's fastest Windows server, achieving 193 megabits per second file serving performance on a Silicon Graphics (R) Origin 200 (R) server with 60 Windows clients."This announcement also reveals one very important fact regarding the interoperability with Windows NT domains: Added following to the "Related Links" section: Linux: Enterprise-ready Mon Feb 1 12:44:07 CST 1999
Added following to the "Related Links" section: Linux bandwagon grows Mon Feb 1 03:55:10 CST 1999
Added following to the "Related Links" section: Computing heavyweights warm to Linux Sun Jan 17 17:42:00 CST 1999
Modified the CGI script siteinfo to point to Netcraft's CGI, which I feel provides better information than my own CGI script. Modified the following text in the "Web Servers" section of the article accordingly: To verify what an Internet site is running at any given time, I have written a CGI script that will query Web Servers and Mail Exchangers for their currently loaded software type so that one can find out the truth about which of these two camps runs the Internet: Tue Jan 12 02:48:40 CST 1999
Since Intel has recently switched to Microsoft IIS 4.0 for its www.intel.com site, had to remove the following from the "Web Servers" section of the article: Given the fact that Microsoft owes much of its success to lower priced PC hardware, i.e. Intel-based machines, you would think that this great Microsoft partner would be running IIS. Well, guess again! www.intel.com runs Netscape FastTrack Server. Fri Jan 1 20:22:00 CST 1999
Added Alan Mercer's feedback IT Managers and their toys and Gary Mulder's feedback A few more points in Unix's favor to the Feedback section. Corrected a multitude of outdated URLs external to our server. Thu Dec 3 01:50:58 CST 1998
Added following to the "Related Links" section: Unix trounces Windows NT in testing Tue Nov 10 01:54:35 CST 1998 Added link to the French Translation of the article. Changed dead URL of the Russian Translation to an older version of a local copy which I had archived earlier. Corrected a mispelling of Robert X. Cringely's last name. Consolidated many different items relating to the former "FreeBSD/Linux-Friendly Vendors" item in the Highlights in this Article index into a single new link:
Added a link to Slashdot - News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. along with many other important resources to the new FreeBSD and Linux Resources document. Updated the link to the "Halloween Documents" in the Related Links section since this has recently been changed by Eric S. Raymond: The Halloween Documents Added a copyright notice at the very end of the article and updated the Disclaimers and Other Legal Information document to reflect the transfer of copyrights and intellectual property from myself, the author, to my corporation, kirch.net Consulting, Inc. The new legal disclaimer also has validity for the UNIX versus NT Organization in general, and all new articles, resources, services, etc. offered by the organization. Tue Nov 3 00:17:12 CST 1998 Added following link to the "Functionality" section (last item in this section, just before the "Reliability" section: See also D. H. Brown's Operating System Scorecard page for other graphical comparisons of the operating systems compared above. Added following to the "Related Links" section: Microsoft: Linux a threat to NT Sat Oct 31 12:45:49 CST 1998
Added Enlightenment to the list of Window Managers in "Common misconceptions", subpart "UNIX is outdated, cryptic..." Added Radovan Bukoci, Bengt Kleberg, Gregory J. Pryzby, and Robert G. Werner to the "Acknowledgments" section. Wed Oct 14 01:32:16 CDT 1998
Added following links to the "Related Links" section: Quality Unix for FREE Added Klaus A. Brunner, Colin Kabaara, and Adrian Mikeliunas to the "Acknowledgments" section. Thu Sep 24 02:07:51 CDT 1998
Added following links to the "Related Links" section: New Security Flap Over Windows NT Added Conrad Sanderson and Ken Webster to the "Acknowledgments" section. Tue Sep 15 14:55:17 CDT 1998
Added following links to the "Related Links" section: A Fight to the Finnish Fri Sep 4 00:43:34 CDT 1998
Added following to the "Product costs and licensing issues" section: In Software Magazine's recent cover story on Linux, Ann Harrison points out how even large companies are finding a cost effective alternative to Microsoft in the deployment of Linux servers:"Randy Kessell, manager of technical analysis for a Southwestern Bell operation center, notes that because Linux allows his company to do more remote network administration and software loads than was possible with either Microsoft or NetWare products, it has driven down their network management costs." Added following to the "Performance" section: Ann Harrison's article provides an excellent testimonial from Southwestern Bell regarding how Linux outperforms NT:Added the following to the "Related Links" section:"Randy Kessell, manager of technical analysis for a Southwestern Bell operation center, . . . adds that his company is thinking about replacing their NT network server with Linux. 'Our preliminary tests show that the Linux solution is outrunning the NT solution,' says Kessell. 'It's much faster.'
Added Howard McKinney to the "Acknowledgments" section for calling my attention to the extraordinary article above. Wed Sep 2 00:28:48 CDT 1998 Added following to the "Linux - NT At at Glance" table to reflect Microsoft's recent attempt to catch up with UNIX in the area of remote administration: Remote Management Tools for NT: Web Administrator 2.0 (a recent addition) offers a large, but still not complete, set of tools. Removed the SGI Web server world record info from the "Performance" section and replaced it with the current title-holder: "The new processor will also make IBM's S70 one of the fastest Web servers on the market when used in certain configurations, according to a certain benchmark test selected by IBM. In a 12-way configuration, the S70 delivered SPECweb96 performance of 9,081 HTTP operations per second, making it the first system to break the 9,000 barrier, according to IBM. Added Gene Mosher to the "Acknowledgments" section for providing the above link, and Martin Espinoza as well as Steve Sinnott for a number of previously contributed links. Thu Aug 27 23:52:55 CDT 1998 Added following to the end of the "Performance" section:
Added the following links to the "Related Links" section:
Fred Weijs was kind enough to notify me that the following article's URL had changed: Interoperability: Possibility or Elusive Dream? -- An Executive White Paper Tue Aug 25 23:53:40 CDT 1998
Kobayashi Osamu informed me that some readers using older browsers had problems with the HTML I used to give the article margins. Corrected this problem. Added following link to the "Related Links" section: Is NT Ready for the Data Center? Sat Aug 22 20:29:11 CDT 1998
Found a Spanish (condensed) translation of my article and added this link at the top of the article. Put the prices of various NT 4.0 products in a table in the "Product costs and licensing issues" section to make it easier to get an overview of their price structure. Updated the list of French and Italian translators in the "Acknowledgments" section. Deleted unnecessary white space to reduce the total size of the HTML file. Also added margins to the article to facilitate easier reading. Fri Aug 21 00:45:35 CDT 1998
Changed URL of article from http://www.kirch.net/unix-nt.html to http://www.kirch.net/unix-nt/. Added internal link for the Microsoft Admits NT Trails Solaris article to the "Highlights in this Article" index (2nd from top). Added Neil McKellar's feedback Process Scheduling to the Feedback section. Thu Aug 20 00:24:50 CDT 1998
Added following to the "Product costs and licensing issues" section:
Added following to the "Reliability" section: When pitted against Sun Microsystems's Solaris, there's really no comparison at all. At the recent Microsoft Global Summit, Computer Reseller News journalists Barbara Darrow and Stuart Glascock interviewed some of the attendees:"We have a Solaris box that hasn't been rebooted in two years," said James Domengeaux, president of Comspace.Com, a Houston-based Web reseller. In comparison, NT servers are rebooted often, he said. "That's a problem especially in e-commerce if you're talking transactions per second, because how many orders do you miss?" he said. Added following links to the "related Links" section:
Added Raj Mathur and Markus Senoner to the "Acknowledgments" section for contributing the links to the above articles. Tue Aug 18 00:32:28 CDT 1998 Received the following award: 
in the NewHoo Computers/Operating_Systems/Unix category Added the following link to the "Related Links" section and added P. Gopalakrishnan to the "Acknowledgments" section for being so thoughtful to contribute the link to this well-written article: Putting Unix in All the Right Places: The reports of Unix's death are greatly exaggerated. Wed Aug 12 01:03:12 CDT 1998 Added the following two links to the "Related Links" section:
Also added the following feedback: Scalability? - Feedback from C Matthew Curtin Sat Aug 8 00:03:54 CDT 1998 The following "FAT versus NTFS" part of the article has been removed because these statements were related more to NT Workstation than to NT Server. Despite the disbelief of some readers, one MIS operations manager told me that it was their policy (a telecom company providing fiber services) to not use NTFS on any of their users' NT Workstations. As a matter of fact, this manager was extremely adamant about this topic: Some MIS departments are reluctant to implement this file system (at least on users' machines), because they feel that recovering from disk problems is hindered by the use of NTFS. It is a common belief that NTFS formatted drives cannot be read by DOS, an important OS in the recovery from such problems. Rune Knapstad informed me of a DOS utility called NTFSDOS which can mount NTFS partitions. It is interesting to note that this is a third-party product and not a Microsoft one. Thu Aug 6 01:54:25 CDT 1998 Added following links to the "Related Links" section:
Moved the section
Microsoft Exchange versus Sendmail:
Views of Other MIS Professionals into a separate file. Deleted the following reader feedback from the performance section since it has come under scrutiny recently. Casual observations contributed by readers may be interesting, but it is essential to maintain the integrity of the article. For the sake of factual comparisons, I will attempt to include only benchmarks from reputable sources conducted in a scientific manner concerning future additions to this section of the article: I've been running the distributed.net RC5 cracking client for about 2 months now... It's installed on every server that has a significant amount of idle time. This includes two identical machines: Both are Dual-Pentium II at 300MHz, 128MB RAM. One is running NT, and has an idle exchange server (we're planning to offer a service on it, but at the moment, its totally idle), and the other is running Linux (we're putting that one through its paces. Its a Samba server, and we're recompiling all kinds of things on it). The Linux box is trying keys at 1.8 times the speed of the NT box. Tue Jul 28 00:40:17 CDT 1998 Added following quotation and link to the section on "Product costs and licensing issues": "Windows NT systems carry lower sticker prices than their Unix counterparts, but ongoing maintenance and support requirements can make them much more costly to run." Fri Jul 24 01:29:24 CDT 1998 Added following link to the "Related Links" section:
Indented the links in the "Related Links" section for aesthetic purposes. Thu Jul 23 00:35:15 CDT 1998 Added following links to the "Related Links" section:
Wed Jul 22 00:35:13 CDT 1998 Updated link to the Japanese translation of the article. Reformatted title section of article. Moved access counter and link to this page to top of article (same line as "Mirror," i.e. between links to translations and title). Added following paragraph to "Product Costs and Licensing Issues" section: The very latest headlines indicate that Linux is well on its way into the major leagues: Informix, Oracle ready to port to Linux (PCWeek Online, 20 July 1998), Oracle to port database to Linux (PCWeek Online, 20 July 1998), and Netscape: Linux a top priority (CNET News.Com, 7 April 1998). Inserted following advertising banner twice in article: at the end of the "Reliability" section and at the beginning of the "Conclusion." 
Added following links to the top of the list in the "Related Links" section:
Added Mike Stephens to the "Acknowledgments" section for providing the two links above. Tue Jul 21 00:03:45 CDT 1998 Added an access counter. Added link to Korean translation of this article and Donghun Han to the Acknowledgments section. Cut the following text from the Security section since I had second thoughts about it when I originally added it. When one reader wrote saying that it detracted from the rest of the article, I felt that it was time to remove it.
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