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Debate Question: would Linux have done so well without the wintel monopoly/monoculture on which it spread?
by codeulike 8y ago
Debate Question: would Linux have done so well without the wintel monopoly/monoculture on which it spread?
- dragonwriter 8y agoYou mean “IBM PC clone”. “Wintel” wasn't really a thing until Microsoft’s dominant consumer and business OSs were Windows, starting with Windows 95, by which point Linux had already done a lot of spreading.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoWindows 3.0 and especially 3.1 were where it took over from DOS in the business world.
- dragonwriter 8y agoWindows 3.x required DOS 3+, it didn't replace DOS. NT and, on the consumer side 95, replaced DOS as the base OS.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoThat's not really an important distinction. 3.x was the first mainstream Windows.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoWin95 still booted from a modified DOS.
- dragonwriter 8y agoTrue, but that DOS and Win95 weren't separate products.
- rwmj 8y agoIt's because MS-DOS and to a lesser extent Windows 3 was so bad at isolating you from the hardware that all the hardware had to be identical. If MS-DOS had been more like, say, CP/M then we would have had loads of weird machines from different manufacturers isolated from the software by proprietary BIOS[1] blobs. This would have made it harder to provide a useful Linux that worked across multiple machines. [1] I mean "BIOS" in the CP/M sense of a layer that completely abstracted the hardware to the BDOS.
- slededit 8y agoQ-DOS from which MS-DOS is derived is basically a clone of CP/M. I've written a CP/M bios for fun to bootstrap my IMSAI. It's not really that high level. You got even more from IBM's BIOS but of course that was too slow for what people wanted to do with those machines - so everyone talked to the hardware directly. In those days it didn't matter what you were doing - the hardware was too slow. It's not like today where you can trade off performance for reliability or cleanliness. People praise Wozniak for his genius of trading hardware for software, but the tight coupling made it really hard to make future iterations. People didn't value upwards compatibility yet.
- pjc50 8y agoDepends on what we had instead. The fact that Wintel systems had unlocked bootloaders was absolutely critical. But it could equally have been started on any system with an MMU. Certainly it's been ported to a lot of systems.
- codeulike 8y agoWas it important to have a monoculture is what I'm wondering.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoThe fact that linux runs on almost anything would probably have helped it in a heterogeneous environment.
- codeulike 8y agoBut is 'linux runs on anything' something that happened after it had achieved critical mass?
- mixmastamyk 8y agoSee sibling comment.
- umanwizard 8y agoHow long has that been true? It certainly started out as PC-only.
- mixmastamyk 8y agoIt was ported pretty early, I remember "beowulf clusters" of devices mentioned on Slashdot in the late 90s. Edit: Checked wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Chronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Chronology 1995: Linux is ported to the DEC Alpha and to the Sun SPARC. Over the following years it is ported to an ever-greater number of platforms.