From: David Arnold <davida@pobox.com>
To: Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>, Josh Good <pepe@naleco.com>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM
Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2021 08:25:48 +1000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAC87179-B572-41B8-8A7F-06B32D6CA2CD@pobox.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2PxEatQLaEqZCN3FfNBRppA86sgE2t6B4BvBc_19Ucw=Q@mail.gmail.com>
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> On 5 Apr 2021, at 02:15, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
<…>
> IBM lost the Research/Universities to DEC which started out being very open and easy to work with and extremely cost-effective. As more $s piled in the market, DEC started to be more and more protective (and moved more and more upscale). To many at the time, DEC compared to IBM (Mainframe S/360 vs. PDP-6/9/10) again -- worse technology, but 'good enough' (and a new growing customer base). The Unix Workstations come out - again 68K vs. Vax (story repeats). Sun eventually taking the lead from DEC. As Larry points out, Sun certainly started being extremely friendly to the same group -- again cost-effective and leading tech. Sun went upscale and the Intel/Microsoft alliance was good enough to a lot of people.
To your earlier point, Unix lost the developers to DOS, and later Windows, because they were more “developer friendly”.
I think the dominant factor was simple: cost. You could get a DOS PC with BASIC, and later eg. Turbo Pascal, for a fraction of what a Unix system cost. And while the OS barely warranted the name, it was accessible in a way that Unix wasn’t. Over a quite short time, the third-party documentation, language support, editors, tools, etc, quickly outpaced Unix systems, and Windows provided a smooth (and still vastly cheaper) upgrade path.
Unix (in the form of Linux) only recruited a significant audience again when its developer cost (nothing, hard to beat) and ease of remote operation outpaced Windows in the late Internet/early Cloud era.
<…>
> For us UNIX historians, we need to be careful and learn from our own history here -- the Cell Phone/Mobile target is the engine for the next Christenian style disruption. It is by far the #1 target for people writing new programs (which I find a little sad personally - but I understand and accept -- time has marched on). In the end, a small mobile target will be the tech on top, and available will be driven by market behavior and those suppliers will be "who has the gold.”
I feel I should point out that both the dominant mobile operating systems are Unix-hased. The UI is necessarily new, but astonishingly the 50 year old basic abstractions are the same.
d
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-04-04 22:27 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 86+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-04-01 14:50 Josh Good
2021-04-01 15:12 ` Warner Losh
2021-04-01 15:27 ` Josh Good
2021-04-01 15:33 ` Larry McVoy
2021-04-01 16:14 ` Kevin Bowling
2021-04-01 16:26 ` John Cowan
2021-04-01 17:54 ` Thomas Paulsen
2021-04-01 16:27 ` Nemo Nusquam
2021-04-02 2:16 ` Kevin Bowling
2021-04-02 3:52 ` Wesley Parish
2021-04-02 5:26 ` Kevin Bowling
2021-04-02 16:03 ` Clem Cole
2021-04-02 16:11 ` Larry McVoy
2021-04-02 16:39 ` Heinz Lycklama
2021-04-02 17:14 ` Clem Cole
2021-04-02 17:17 ` [TUHS] AIX repeat [was " Charles H Sauer
2021-04-03 1:24 ` [TUHS] " Wesley Parish
2021-04-04 2:46 ` Adam Thornton
2021-04-04 2:50 ` Adam Thornton
2021-04-04 5:29 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) G. Branden Robinson
2021-04-04 18:22 ` Clem Cole
2021-04-04 20:54 ` Richard Salz
2021-04-04 21:11 ` Clem Cole
2021-04-05 0:36 ` John Cowan
2021-04-05 2:19 ` Warner Losh
2021-04-05 18:07 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference John Gilmore
2021-04-05 19:30 ` Clem Cole
2021-04-05 20:34 ` Richard Salz
2021-04-05 20:42 ` William Cheswick
2021-04-06 4:37 ` Ed Bradford
2021-04-05 20:39 ` Larry McVoy
2021-04-05 21:11 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-04-05 21:17 ` Dan Cross
2021-04-06 15:39 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-04-06 5:49 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-04-05 7:48 ` [TUHS] Whither Usenix [was How To Kill A Technical Conference] arnold
2021-04-05 14:05 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) Theodore Ts'o
2021-04-05 22:26 ` David Arnold
2021-04-04 23:30 ` A. P. Garcia
2021-04-04 3:41 ` [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM Gregg Levine
2021-04-04 3:57 ` Adam Thornton
2021-04-02 5:41 ` David Arnold
2021-04-02 6:09 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-04-02 7:00 ` arnold
2021-04-02 9:53 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-04-02 10:26 ` arnold
2021-04-02 14:02 ` Josh Good
2021-04-02 14:17 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-04-02 15:16 ` Larry McVoy
2021-04-02 15:28 ` Fabio Scotoni
2021-04-03 1:50 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-04-03 1:55 ` Warner Losh
2021-04-03 2:23 ` Larry McVoy
2021-04-03 2:34 ` Earl Baugh
2021-04-03 6:16 ` Dan Stromberg
2021-04-04 16:18 ` Tony Finch
2021-04-04 1:48 ` David Arnold
2021-04-04 2:23 ` Larry McVoy
2021-04-04 8:55 ` Josh Good
2021-04-04 14:43 ` Michael Parson
2021-04-04 15:36 ` Warner Losh
2021-04-04 16:15 ` Clem Cole
2021-04-04 22:25 ` David Arnold [this message]
2021-04-04 22:55 ` Clem Cole
2021-04-05 2:30 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-04-04 23:00 ` Bakul Shah
2021-04-04 23:33 ` Clem Cole
2021-04-05 1:34 ` Bakul Shah
2021-04-05 2:58 ` Kenneth Goodwin
2021-04-05 12:35 ` John Cowan
2021-04-05 20:44 ` Kevin Bowling
2021-04-04 23:34 ` Josh Good
2021-04-04 20:08 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)
2021-04-04 21:00 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-04-04 21:40 ` Clem Cole
2021-04-04 21:54 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)
2021-04-04 22:02 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-04-04 21:58 ` Clem Cole
2021-04-04 23:48 ` Dave Horsfall
2021-04-04 23:53 ` Larry McVoy
2021-04-07 5:15 ` Dan Stromberg
2021-04-05 13:37 ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-04-07 1:52 ` Adam Thornton
2021-04-02 15:25 ` Josh Good
2021-04-03 3:10 ` John Cowan
2021-04-02 16:40 ` Boyd Lynn Gerber
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