From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: paul.winalski@gmail.com (Paul Winalski) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2017 12:30:47 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 9/8/17, William Pechter wrote: > If it wasn't for Unix, it possibly would have been VMS on Alpha... Or OS/2. > Early Windows 3.x wouldn't have cut it. > > Perhaps without the Unix workstations DEC might have survived. > > Interesting alternate history... Clem Cole and I could go on for pages on why DEC went out of business. But it's pretty much off-topic for this list. SUN captured the workstation market from Apollo and DEC because they managed to sell workstations cheaper than their competitors. I don't think that the OS being UNIX had very much to do with it. But using UNIX probably lowered SUN's software development costs, and no doubt that contributed to their lower workstation cost. What ultimately did in DEC was missing the PC wave. PCs did the same thing to the minicomputer and workstation companies that minicomputers did to mainframes in the 1970s. PCs offered equivalent (or better) capabilities at much reduced cost. First they ate the word processor market (remember Wang?) and then minicomputers and workstations. UNIX workstation manufacturers such as SUN suffered the same fate as DEC at the hands of the PC. UNIX did not save them. -Paul W.