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I remain amazed that the #1 shipper of Unix systems today is .. Apple. I grew up on Unix in the 80's, cut my teeth on MIPS RISC/os and then Irix and SunOS and
by somesortofsystm 6y ago
I remain amazed that the #1 shipper of Unix systems today is .. Apple.
I grew up on Unix in the 80's, cut my teeth on MIPS RISC/os and then Irix and SunOS and all the joys of the very first days of Linux, oh my .. and I was fully prepared to be an SGI fanboy for the rest of my life - and then, they abandoned Irix and shipped NT. sadface
So when the tiBook came out, and it was promised to have a Unix on it, I jumped off my Indy and O2 workstation onto Apple - a company I'd never imagined, in my wildest 80's and 90's fever dreams, would become the one company still standing in the Unix wars. The tiBook was just soo good, and despite all of its warts in the early days, MacOS X' underpinnings with Darwin were just good enough to swing the decision to use it as a Unix-developers machine. And, it has been solid for 20 years as a platform in that regard, although the writing is definitely on the wall for us Unix geeks who nevertheless carry a Macbook.
If only SGI had made a laptop, and not been wooed away from sanity by the NT freaks. Can you imagine if SGI (Nvidia) had made that laptop before Apple did .. ? I sure can.
- kristopolous 6y agoThey made a rather strange o2 laptop that never made it to production. A number of legendary companies with great potential misstepped, GRiD, Blackberry, Be, MasPar, Thinking Machines, GO corp, Intergraph, heck go back to the Evans & Sutherland LDS-1 in 1969 or when BBN decided not to get into hardware after making the first internet hardware ever, the IMP. Or how about how SRI fumbled the ball after Englebarts work or SDS, who made a bunch of the NASA Apollo hardware. The world is littered with great technology companies that didn't stick around because we determine success and failure by handshakes on the golf course.
- somesortofsystm 6y agoYeah, I saw the Indy-laptop once during a demo in Hollywood .. was definitely a clunky pile of junk. You're right about that golfing handshake.
- kristopolous 6y agoSgi hardware wasn't that great from about o2 onwards. I used a lot of those machines and they were kinda dogs
- ubermonkey 6y agoIt's been said pretty often -- and I think it's true -- that the introduction and success of OS X drastically slowed the adoption of Linux as a mainstream desktop option. I take no position on whether this was good or bad overall; it's just a statement of fact. Lots of us who would've otherwise needed to shift to Linux for LAMP development or whatever after the dot-com crash migrated to the Mac instead, because it meant a unix laptop that Just Works that also allowed us to run native MS Office, etc. That was a powerful value proposition (and remains one). " the writing is definitely on the wall for us Unix geeks who nevertheless carry a Macbook." I do not yet see this writing.
- JdeBP 6y agoWere you amazed back in the days when one of the most popular Unix flavours was produced by Microsoft? Yes, Xenix.
- somesortofsystm 6y agoNo, because I was using a real Unix (RISC/OS) and saw the writing on the wall for Xenix soon enough to know it was a dead end. I knew absolutely nobody in my region (SoCal) who used it.