5 Apr
2021
5 Apr
'21
12:25 a.m.
On 5 Apr 2021, at 02:15, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)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