On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 7:35 AM, Tim Bradshaw <tfb@tfeb.org> wrote:

But the people who have spent 9-figure sums on all this marginally-functional tin that the Unix vendors foisted on them don't look at it that way: they just want something which is not Unix, and which runs on cheap tin.

Fair enough -- but I think that this is really another way of describing Prof. Christiansen's disruption theory. The "lessor" technology wins over "better" technology because it's good enough.

I'm curious for the Banks, in your experience - which were the UNIX vendors that were pushing 9-figure UNIX boxes. I'll guess, IBM was one of them. Maybe NCR. What HP, Sun, DEC in that bundle?

Linux is not Unix, and runs on cheap tin.

believe that

the point you are making is that "white box" PC's running a UNIX-like system - aka Linux could comes pretty close to doing what the highly touted AIX, NCR et al were doing and were "good enough" to get the job done.

And that's not a statement about UNIX as much as a statement about, the WINTEL ecosystem, that Linux sat on top of and did an extremely impressive job of utilizing.