8 Feb
2018
8 Feb
'18
12:50 a.m.
On Feb 6, 2018, at 5:54 PM, Dan Cross
<crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
But much VMS, whatever HP minicomputer stuff was floating around (MPE?) and all VM/CMS (I
guess it was actually VM/ESA by that time) disappeared; VAXstations, serial terminals and
3179G's were all replaced by PCs running Windows and the users were replaced by these
smiling robots. It was weird.
“Attack of the killer micros”! Anyone remember Eugene Brooks’ 1989 comp.arch
article? Brooks was talking about this in relation to supercomputers but the killer
micros first killed the minicomputer market.
Somehow, most of the Unix people managed to escape.
...
I wonder, too, if Unix networking didn't play a
major role. I have this dim sense that NT was designed for a world in which it was still
assumed that the OSI suite was going to win the networking wars. When, almost to
everyone's surprise, the Internet ended up taking off Unix was already
well-positioned to respond and NT had to play catch up.
In 1994 or so, a friend who had been at Microsoft for many years tried
to convince me that Windows networking was going to win. Microsoft’s
reality distortion field being very strong in Redmond, he simply couldn’t
see how windows networking would *not* succeed (I saw similar RDF
effects at other big companies). A week late Bill Gates announced
Windows will fully support IP. By then most of the internet related services
were already running on unix. And anyone technically savvy could bring
Linux or BSD for free on an inexpensive PC.