Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 22:07:03 +0100 From: Roelof Osinga <roelof@nisser.com> To: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> Cc: "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: OT: non-Unix history (Was: FreeBSD vs linux) Message-ID: <3A6F43F7.E43C6CA0@nisser.com> References: <14957.31196.939559.889627@guru.mired.org>
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Mike Meyer wrote: > > ... > If you want to argue that one of the reasons that Unix failed on the > desktop was that X allowed the users to run arbitrarily strange window > managers, and most of those window managers allowed configuration to > an extent that would require major rewrites of MacOS or Windows, I > won't argue. I would claim that the kernel APIs being different were > more of a reason, but that's just me. Lets not forget that machines weren't as fast then as they are now. We tried to switch to UNIX in that time, the heydays of UNIX in that it got heralded everywhere as the new king of all systems. That was in 1986/1987. In that specific market niche we were operating in then a sanctioned - we're talking ambulant mental health care institutions, government funded - conglomerate too decided UNIX was the way to go. Since the client base was moving to, in this case, Northern Telecom Vienna machines we did too. No big deal, DataFlex ran fine on everything including Vaxen <g>. The box we got was a 6 MHz iAPX 286 with 5 MB RAM, 70 MB hard disk, intelligent serial controller with 4 ports, CGA color <g> and some very fine terminals. Some US$ 35K after developer discount. Including Micro Soft Xenix III with SDK but we skipped the TCP/IP pack, alas. We were working with 5 persons on that box. We were the lucky ones. There were institutions working with over 16 persons on a slightly bigger box (had a 8 MHz 80286 ;) running stuff like wordprocessing (Lyx? nah), spreadsheet and IS apps. There were a lot of complaints to be heard. So we went back to selling IMS, nay L/F Technologies S-100 boxes running TurboDOS <g>. Novell wasn't quite there yet. Sure, if you had an Apollo or a Sun station life was fine. But most businesses (and like organisations) didn't. Then life was not so great. Next thing you knew you got System V in a version per hardware manufacturer. Sinix, Ultrix, Whateverix. Novell had it easy. By the time X got both workable *and* affordable there was no beating the PC lead. Lotus ruled and WordStar was king, then WordPerfect. Neither of which ran on UNIX or worked with X. To top it all off, MS introduced OS/2 3.0, sorry, NT 3.1. To go after the Novell market. They got it, too. The only slipup they made was releasing, let us say, products that weren't quit there yet <g>. So they lost trust. Around that time a certain Linus released some sort of virus on the 'Net ;). It has rekindled interest in UNIX. Maybe even a sort of second coming <g>. Or at least introduced a second heyday! Nobody in its right mind believed Linux would grow this far. I do not have a right mind ;). I'm more left wing <g>. Roelof -- Home is where the (@) http://eboa.com/ is. Nisser home -- http://nl.nisser.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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