Talk:Banyan (company)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'm not sure that the term "bitter" is a fair description. Banyan Systems had some excellent products, but the corporation ultimately failed due to numerous missteps and poor decisions by its management. That's not bitterness, it's fact.

All versions of VINES had a menu selection for gaining access to the UNIX kernel; however, it was password-protected, and as stated in the article, the passwords were closely guarded by Banyan.

For its later versions of VINES, Banyan did offer a VINES Toolkit for sale. It was designed for third-party developers, and allowed access to APIs and a limited set of UNIX functions. It did not provide direct access to the UNIX kernel. Again, the only way to get direct access was to know the password.

As to POV problems - the history of a small company like Banyan, which was privately-held for the majority of its existence, would necessarily have to be written by insiders. To me this means there will always be some unavoidable bias in the POV. If that makes it unacceptable for inclusion on Wikipedia, the article should be deleted. I hope that does not happen though, because I think it would be a shame. I have not been able to find any evidence of another attempt to summarize the history of this company. If this article is deleted, who will write another, and if someone did, would it be an improvement? 68.54.230.197 (talk) 22:38, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Enlarged the article on Banyan VINES

Writers sound pretty bitter with Banyan's legendarilly incompetent business leadership. While I didn't go into that, I greatly expanded the article on Banyan VINES. I was a Banyan engineer, myself for over 10 years. Anyone interested in an article on Banyan engineers? SimonATL (talk) 04:06, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

The article states, "Banyan's NOS was built on AT&T's UNIX System V Release 3 (SVR3); however, the UNIX kernel was protected from access by anyone but Banyan personnel." However, later versions of Banyan Vines had a purchasable option to "Access UNIX" and there was a menu item for the same. Since I can't cite a source and I am working from memory, I have opted not to edit the page, but encourage someone with more personal or cite-able knowledge to do so. This article definitely seems to have POV problems as well. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.100.58.182 (talk) 05:50, 2 May 2008 (UTC)