Unix [was: do...until wisdom needed...]

[Ben Hutchings]

Andrew Kuchling <akuchlin at mems-exchange.org> writes:

> "Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g at Virginia.EDU> writes:
> >  I was seeing pretty massive migration to windows and NT
> > (well -- in the case of NT, at least a lot of *thinking* 
> > about migrating, if not actual movement) riding on the
> > back of cheap commodity x86 computers. 
> 
> I suspect that, if Linux hadn't been written, the resolution of the
> AT&T vs. Berkeley lawsuit would have let some BSD-derived system
> fulfill the same role.  
> 
> (Someday I have to borrow the time machine and incite someone to write
> a free Unix for the 386 when it first came out.  Unix + X would have
> been serious competition for Windows 3.x, and we might not be in so
> much of a software monoculture right now.)

Only if Unix had been more compatible with Unix, and with ordinary
human beings.  In those days, Unix was not only very expensive, but
its various vendors provided very different feature sets and supported
rival standards.  It took a while even to standardise on X as the Unix
windowing system, let alone on Motif, mwm and CDE.  Of course these
components were also expensive and complicated, making Unix pretty
impractical as an OS for the desktop.  Now we have the much better KDE
and GNOME - but they're competing with Windows 2000/Me and not Windows
3.x.

-- 
Any opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of Roundpoint.