Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 16:54:54 -0600 (CST) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: Roelof Osinga <roelof@nisser.com> Cc: "Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: OT: non-Unix history (Was: FreeBSD vs linux) Message-ID: <14959.23870.728403.859934@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <3A6F43F7.E43C6CA0@nisser.com> References: <14957.31196.939559.889627@guru.mired.org> <3A6F43F7.E43C6CA0@nisser.com>
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Roelof Osinga <roelof@nisser.com> types: > Mike Meyer wrote: > > If you want to argue that one of the reasons that Unix failed on the > > desktop was that X allowed the users to run arbitrarily strange window > > managers, and most of those window managers allowed configuration to > > an extent that would require major rewrites of MacOS or Windows, I > > won't argue. I would claim that the kernel APIs being different were > > more of a reason, but that's just me. > Lets not forget that machines weren't as fast then as they are > now. We tried to switch to UNIX in that time, the heydays of UNIX > in that it got heralded everywhere as the new king of all systems. There are *lots* of potential reasons, many of them good ones. The issue about machine speed shows up in the infamous "Worse is better" paper, and I talk about this particular case in my "Good enough is best" paper <URL: http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/good-enough.html > (which provides pointers to "Worse is better" as well as covering the salient features). > Next thing you knew you got System V in a version per hardware > manufacturer. Sinix, Ultrix, Whateverix. Novell had it easy. Actually, Ultrix is a BSD derivative, and didn't require a SysV license. But they changed it later. Ditto for Sun and Mips - both started on BSD with a SysIII license, then went to SysV. But The Unix market splintering that way was what "the kernel APIs being different" was referring to. You couldn't port an application to Unix - you had to port it to each variant. Since VMS - and later NT - were usually a larger market than any single Unix vendor, even if it wasn't as big as all of them put together, it got preference. > By > the time X got both workable *and* affordable there was no beating > the PC lead. Lotus ruled and WordStar was king, then WordPerfect. > Neither of which ran on UNIX or worked with X. Later, of course, WordPerfect started running on nearly anything - I even had an Amiga vesion at one point. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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