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"Oppose Sun Forever", heh. Yes, indeed, I used it in 1996-7 on the Alpha, just after it was renamed Digital Unix from DEC OSF/1 AXP. It was very nice, ran eve

by hga 11y ago

"Oppose Sun Forever", heh. Yes, indeed, I used it in 1996-7 on the Alpha, just after it was renamed Digital Unix from DEC OSF/1 AXP. It was very nice, ran everything we wanted well, plus had a great High Availability capability. But I didn't view it as a major contender, back then at least, Sun provided the systems of choice. Assuming you could manage to buy them. As for Win 16 -> Win 98 -> XP ... I don't know, I went from Windows 3.1 to NT, and as far as I could tell NT was better and more stable than the legacy non-memory protected stuff; hmmm, but I'll bet not for games (and NT4 putting graphics in the kernel was ugly). XP was great, and due to things mentioned elsewhere, I and then my parents used it for more than a decade.

scholia 11y ago
Yes, NT was much more stable than Windows 95/98/98SE, and technically superior. Unfortunately it wouldn't run quite a lot of Windows programs, and one of them was whatever we used for AOL access, which was quite important at the time. I dual-booted the two types of Windows way back then, and it was just too hard to stay on the NT side.... To some extent (possibly a large extent), OSF/1 was a push against the AT&T/Sun effort to unify Unix with SVR4. It just ended up more fractured than ever, which was a shame. There was a brief window when Unix could perhaps have been more successful. That was between DOS and the Windows vs OS/2 war, when Microsoft Xenix was relatively successful. However, IBM was dead against Unix at the time, and OS/2 EE was meant to be the IBM-owned cornerstone of its Systems Application Architecture. Unix could run on everything from PCs to Amdahl mainframes and supercomputers, whereas IBM had two major mainframe operating systems, at least five on minicomputers, plus workstations and desktops. No wonder IBM saw Unix as a massive threat to its account control.

by hga 11y ago

scholia 11y ago

Yes, NT was much more stable than Windows 95/98/98SE, and technically superior. Unfortunately it wouldn't run quite a lot of Windows programs, and one of them was whatever we used for AOL access, which was quite important at the time. I dual-booted the two types of Windows way back then, and it was just too hard to stay on the NT side.... To some extent (possibly a large extent), OSF/1 was a push against the AT&T/Sun effort to unify Unix with SVR4. It just ended up more fractured than ever, which was a shame. There was a brief window when Unix could perhaps have been more successful. That was between DOS and the Windows vs OS/2 war, when Microsoft Xenix was relatively successful. However, IBM was dead against Unix at the time, and OS/2 EE was meant to be the IBM-owned cornerstone of its Systems Application Architecture. Unix could run on everything from PCs to Amdahl mainframes and supercomputers, whereas IBM had two major mainframe operating systems, at least five on minicomputers, plus workstations and desktops. No wonder IBM saw Unix as a massive threat to its account control.