5 ms·

Interesting that the article calls out the price point as one of the reasons it didn't succeed. Although a lot of that was the OS only having drivers for expen

Interesting that the article calls out the price point as one of the reasons it didn't succeed. Although a lot of that was the OS only having drivers for expensive hardware and being unusable on the lower end Macs. That said, high price killed off most of the legacy Unix vendors/products. The world was changing around them and they weren't ready or able to give up the profit margins they had enjoyed for so long. Personal computers were becoming commodity equipment and free versions of Unix were hard to compete against.

rbanffy 5y ago
It was, in retrospect, a mistake not to embrace good enough and, instead, keep pushing towards the high end of the market when good enough was what most users needed. Of course a Unix workstation was twice as fast as a PC and cost twice as much, but it becomes pointless when most of the time it’s bored to death waiting for me to move the mouse.
- gumby 5y ago
  The irony for me is that Unix was the (unhappy) inspiration for the famous “worse is better” memo. The Unix workstation vendors made high end hardware with (semi-) commodity software, and had their lunch eaten by generic hardware coupled with software that gave more people a better experience. (Though personally not at all a fan of most of the Unix paradigm, for me it’s a vastly superior experience to Windows. But I can’t deny that that is not the case for most people)
  - aoki 5y ago
    “Worse” was Bell Labs: portable C/Unix. As opposed to MIT: codesigned Lisp/LispMs. The Unix workstation was the triumph of COTS micros over LSI or custom VLSI hardware.
    - gumby 5y ago
      > The Unix workstation was the triumph of COTS micros over LSI or custom VLSI hardware. Well the Sun-1 definitely started there, no question (I don’t remember the Daisy or Apollo hardware). HP definitely never did and Sun (and SGI et al) all went down the custom hardware rabbit hole. By the time they tried to hop onto the PC hardware train it was too late. None of those companies survive in any meaningful way. BTW if you catch this in time to edit: you might want to put a hyphen between “co” and “design” because you didn’t mean signing code.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        My impression is that they all built desktop minicomputers possible thanks to CPUs like the 68K but moved on to RISC designs when the 68K started showing its age. I would not say the PA-RISC was open, but SPARC had multiple sources and MIPS showed up everywhere. At that period, the x86 was not an option - Sun tried.
        ncmncm 5y ago
        Apollo was building bit-slice 68000 emulations (to have an MMU) into the mid '80s, and ran Aegis, their homegrown fully-networked GUI OS, coded in their home-grown Pascal, with their home-grown touchpad pointer and home-grown token-ring network, on those and on actual 68K into the late '80s. Aegis was inspired by MULTICS, not Unix, and was definitely a better system. They were demand-paging across the network in the early '80s. One feature I recall stood out: they expanded environment variables in symbolic link text, like /usr/bin -> /usr/$SYSTEM/bin to get a SYSV or BSD Unix flavor, later on. The only Unix that does something similar I know of is Dragonfly.
        rbanffy 5y ago
        > Aegis was inspired by MULTICS, not Unix, and was definitely a better system. They were demand-paging across the network in the early '80s. I’d love to see one of those operating. We have lost so many great ideas we seem to never revisit…
        5y ago
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    I was there at that time, there are manuals in white binders down the hall from me now. The Mac was made to never, ever, use the command line. That is what I chose to develop for at that time, including exposure to "high end" machines at University. fun fact - there were no undergraduate courses in computer science at that time; master's level and up .. you have to be trained to use those workstations, even for five minutes, AND the oversight of an admin with security. Mac? get one, fire it up, make Mac Paint pictures. The network IS NOT the computer, thankyouverymuch
    - reaperducer 5y ago
      fun fact - there were no undergraduate courses in computer science at that time Perhaps this was regional. I was enrolled in undergraduate Computer Science courses at this time, and it was at a pretty low-end state university.
    - Taniwha 5y ago
      I actually wrote a large chunk of the A/UX unix port (late 80s) - a decade before (mid 70s) I'd obtained an undergraduate degree in Comp Sci (in New Zealand) - undergraduate Comp Sci was very much a thing at the time
      - mistrial9 5y ago
        not at Berkeley ! but proper respect to you Taniwha, many paths
        Taniwha 5y ago
        Well I did the A/UX port IN Berkeley (the city, not the university). The thing is that as a discipline Comp Sci is a late comer, university Comp Sci departments came from lots of places, some grew out of Engineering depts, others from Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Commerce, others from the computing infrastructure groups withing universities - they ended up being called all sorts of things - early on places offered Comp Sci by a whole lot of names
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > Unix was the (unhappy) inspiration for the famous “worse is better” memo. It could be rephrased as “done is better than perfect”. I would love to have a high-end workstation based on exotic hardware with ridiculously fast storage, but an average home PC is probably enough for my development work and, when it’s not, I can acknowledge it is so because the software is much more bloated than it should be.
- silvestrov 5y ago
  The Macintosh was the "good enough" version of the "Apple Lisa". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    It saddens me the beautiful stationery metaphor of the Lisa got ditched in favour of files and applications… The Lisa deserved better.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      That and Object Pascal being replaced by C++.
      - zeckalpha 5y ago
        C++ was not yet released when the Mac was released.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Indeed, and what I am talking about happened after the Mac being released. > By this point, in the late 1980s, the market was moving towards C++, and the beta version of Apple C++ compiler appeared in 1989, around the MacApp 2.0 release.[5] At the same time, Apple was deep in the effort to release System 7, which had a number of major new features. The decision was made to transition to an entirely new version of MacApp, 3.0, which would use C++ in place of Object Pascal. This move was subject to a long and heated debate between proponents of Object Pascal and C++ in the Usenet and other forums. Nevertheless, 3.0 managed to garner a reasonable following after its release in 1991, even though the developer suite, MPW, was growing outdated. Apple then downsized the entire developer tools group, leaving both MacApp and MPW understaffed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacApp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacApp And then most just moved into Codewarrior and PowerPlant anyway.
- jandrese 5y ago
  If the workstations were twice as fast and cost twice as much they would still have a good market niche. Instead they were more like 30% faster and cost 10 times as much. Intel eroded that speed delta pretty quickly too. The other chip makers were crushed by Intel's billions of R&D spending.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Motorola's floating point was 5x as fast as Intel's. That wasn't enough to overcome market positioning.
scruffyherder 5y ago
more so the platform + the OS... I guess being in for 4k for a base machine (probably 2k more to make it usable) 500/1000 more isn't going to break it, but 386BSD machines while far less usable would be a heck of a lot cheaper.
rjsw 5y ago
It was expensive. In 1987 I built a 386-25 with 16MB RAM and SCSI HD that ran Interactive Systems UNIX for a lot less than it would have cost to get a Mac II with A/UX.
- jbellis 5y ago
  16MB in 1987, good lord. I didn't even know that was possible on x86 at the time.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    16MB systems were still mainstream in 1997! Lots of 166Mhz and 200Mhz Pentium systems sold with 16MB of RAM that year.
    - leoc 5y ago
      When Windows NT first came out in 1993 its 12-16MB memory requirement was considered to be a major obstacle to adoption, IIRC.
  - rjsw 5y ago
    That was using socketed DIL chips, 8MB on the motherboard and another 8MB on an expansion card. I had to insert the chips individually into the sockets. I had mis-remembered the disks, it used ESDI not SCSI.
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  Interactive still did beat SCO/Xenix on price in 1992 for running Oracle (on 386 hardware that costed as little as a single 857 MB hard disk on RS/6000 with AIX). And Novell 2 or 3 sure did beat A/UX as AppleTalk file server.
rodgerd 5y ago
> That said, high price killed off most of the legacy Unix vendors/products. High price and the differentiation. In the 90s I was working in publishing and publishing-adjacent companies that were throwing out their Unix environments as quick as they could after NT 4 was released. They were all sick of dealing with the crap of having multiple, subtly incompatible *ix environments to deal with: one company I worked for had Irix, AIX, SunOS, Solaris, and both flavours of Digital's Unix products, because various vendors had done deals with the different vendors to ship their products on those variants. Each came with different shells, different userlands, and all required slightly different tweaking and tuning to maintain operationally. Contrast that with the NT 4 world, where that same business was quite happy to buy extremely expensive Alpha/NT systems so that the same skills, tool, and so on that worked everywhere.
scruffyherder 5y ago
Imagine in today’s money sinking 12,000 USD on a computer. Do you take the Macintosh II with A/UX aka Unix from a company that doesn’t seem all too interested in the product themselves and selling what seems like a toy or do you go with SUN? They hired Bill Joy, and they are 100% committed to Unix? They simply cost too much for a non commital company like Apple. If anything it’s amazing they saw it through to the end of the Quadra

rbanffy 5y ago

It was, in retrospect, a mistake not to embrace good enough and, instead, keep pushing towards the high end of the market when good enough was what most users needed. Of course a Unix workstation was twice as fast as a PC and cost twice as much, but it becomes pointless when most of the time it’s bored to death waiting for me to move the mouse.

gumby 5y ago
The irony for me is that Unix was the (unhappy) inspiration for the famous “worse is better” memo. The Unix workstation vendors made high end hardware with (semi-) commodity software, and had their lunch eaten by generic hardware coupled with software that gave more people a better experience. (Though personally not at all a fan of most of the Unix paradigm, for me it’s a vastly superior experience to Windows. But I can’t deny that that is not the case for most people)
- aoki 5y ago
  “Worse” was Bell Labs: portable C/Unix. As opposed to MIT: codesigned Lisp/LispMs. The Unix workstation was the triumph of COTS micros over LSI or custom VLSI hardware.
  - gumby 5y ago
    > The Unix workstation was the triumph of COTS micros over LSI or custom VLSI hardware. Well the Sun-1 definitely started there, no question (I don’t remember the Daisy or Apollo hardware). HP definitely never did and Sun (and SGI et al) all went down the custom hardware rabbit hole. By the time they tried to hop onto the PC hardware train it was too late. None of those companies survive in any meaningful way. BTW if you catch this in time to edit: you might want to put a hyphen between “co” and “design” because you didn’t mean signing code.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      My impression is that they all built desktop minicomputers possible thanks to CPUs like the 68K but moved on to RISC designs when the 68K started showing its age. I would not say the PA-RISC was open, but SPARC had multiple sources and MIPS showed up everywhere. At that period, the x86 was not an option - Sun tried.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        Apollo was building bit-slice 68000 emulations (to have an MMU) into the mid '80s, and ran Aegis, their homegrown fully-networked GUI OS, coded in their home-grown Pascal, with their home-grown touchpad pointer and home-grown token-ring network, on those and on actual 68K into the late '80s. Aegis was inspired by MULTICS, not Unix, and was definitely a better system. They were demand-paging across the network in the early '80s. One feature I recall stood out: they expanded environment variables in symbolic link text, like /usr/bin -> /usr/$SYSTEM/bin to get a SYSV or BSD Unix flavor, later on. The only Unix that does something similar I know of is Dragonfly.
        rbanffy 5y ago
        > Aegis was inspired by MULTICS, not Unix, and was definitely a better system. They were demand-paging across the network in the early '80s. I’d love to see one of those operating. We have lost so many great ideas we seem to never revisit…
        5y ago
- mistrial9 5y ago
  I was there at that time, there are manuals in white binders down the hall from me now. The Mac was made to never, ever, use the command line. That is what I chose to develop for at that time, including exposure to "high end" machines at University. fun fact - there were no undergraduate courses in computer science at that time; master's level and up .. you have to be trained to use those workstations, even for five minutes, AND the oversight of an admin with security. Mac? get one, fire it up, make Mac Paint pictures. The network IS NOT the computer, thankyouverymuch
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    fun fact - there were no undergraduate courses in computer science at that time Perhaps this was regional. I was enrolled in undergraduate Computer Science courses at this time, and it was at a pretty low-end state university.
  - Taniwha 5y ago
    I actually wrote a large chunk of the A/UX unix port (late 80s) - a decade before (mid 70s) I'd obtained an undergraduate degree in Comp Sci (in New Zealand) - undergraduate Comp Sci was very much a thing at the time
    - mistrial9 5y ago
      not at Berkeley ! but proper respect to you Taniwha, many paths
      - Taniwha 5y ago
        Well I did the A/UX port IN Berkeley (the city, not the university). The thing is that as a discipline Comp Sci is a late comer, university Comp Sci departments came from lots of places, some grew out of Engineering depts, others from Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Commerce, others from the computing infrastructure groups withing universities - they ended up being called all sorts of things - early on places offered Comp Sci by a whole lot of names
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > Unix was the (unhappy) inspiration for the famous “worse is better” memo. It could be rephrased as “done is better than perfect”. I would love to have a high-end workstation based on exotic hardware with ridiculously fast storage, but an average home PC is probably enough for my development work and, when it’s not, I can acknowledge it is so because the software is much more bloated than it should be.
silvestrov 5y ago
The Macintosh was the "good enough" version of the "Apple Lisa". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa
- rbanffy 5y ago
  It saddens me the beautiful stationery metaphor of the Lisa got ditched in favour of files and applications… The Lisa deserved better.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    That and Object Pascal being replaced by C++.
    - zeckalpha 5y ago
      C++ was not yet released when the Mac was released.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Indeed, and what I am talking about happened after the Mac being released. > By this point, in the late 1980s, the market was moving towards C++, and the beta version of Apple C++ compiler appeared in 1989, around the MacApp 2.0 release.[5] At the same time, Apple was deep in the effort to release System 7, which had a number of major new features. The decision was made to transition to an entirely new version of MacApp, 3.0, which would use C++ in place of Object Pascal. This move was subject to a long and heated debate between proponents of Object Pascal and C++ in the Usenet and other forums. Nevertheless, 3.0 managed to garner a reasonable following after its release in 1991, even though the developer suite, MPW, was growing outdated. Apple then downsized the entire developer tools group, leaving both MacApp and MPW understaffed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacApp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacApp And then most just moved into Codewarrior and PowerPlant anyway.
jandrese 5y ago
If the workstations were twice as fast and cost twice as much they would still have a good market niche. Instead they were more like 30% faster and cost 10 times as much. Intel eroded that speed delta pretty quickly too. The other chip makers were crushed by Intel's billions of R&D spending.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Motorola's floating point was 5x as fast as Intel's. That wasn't enough to overcome market positioning.

scruffyherder 5y ago

more so the platform + the OS... I guess being in for 4k for a base machine (probably 2k more to make it usable) 500/1000 more isn't going to break it, but 386BSD machines while far less usable would be a heck of a lot cheaper.

rjsw 5y ago

It was expensive. In 1987 I built a 386-25 with 16MB RAM and SCSI HD that ran Interactive Systems UNIX for a lot less than it would have cost to get a Mac II with A/UX.

jbellis 5y ago
16MB in 1987, good lord. I didn't even know that was possible on x86 at the time.
- jandrese 5y ago
  16MB systems were still mainstream in 1997! Lots of 166Mhz and 200Mhz Pentium systems sold with 16MB of RAM that year.
  - leoc 5y ago
    When Windows NT first came out in 1993 its 12-16MB memory requirement was considered to be a major obstacle to adoption, IIRC.
- rjsw 5y ago
  That was using socketed DIL chips, 8MB on the motherboard and another 8MB on an expansion card. I had to insert the chips individually into the sockets. I had mis-remembered the disks, it used ESDI not SCSI.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Interactive still did beat SCO/Xenix on price in 1992 for running Oracle (on 386 hardware that costed as little as a single 857 MB hard disk on RS/6000 with AIX). And Novell 2 or 3 sure did beat A/UX as AppleTalk file server.

rodgerd 5y ago

> That said, high price killed off most of the legacy Unix vendors/products. High price and the differentiation. In the 90s I was working in publishing and publishing-adjacent companies that were throwing out their Unix environments as quick as they could after NT 4 was released. They were all sick of dealing with the crap of having multiple, subtly incompatible *ix environments to deal with: one company I worked for had Irix, AIX, SunOS, Solaris, and both flavours of Digital's Unix products, because various vendors had done deals with the different vendors to ship their products on those variants. Each came with different shells, different userlands, and all required slightly different tweaking and tuning to maintain operationally. Contrast that with the NT 4 world, where that same business was quite happy to buy extremely expensive Alpha/NT systems so that the same skills, tool, and so on that worked everywhere.

scruffyherder 5y ago

Imagine in today’s money sinking 12,000 USD on a computer. Do you take the Macintosh II with A/UX aka Unix from a company that doesn’t seem all too interested in the product themselves and selling what seems like a toy or do you go with SUN? They hired Bill Joy, and they are 100% committed to Unix? They simply cost too much for a non commital company like Apple. If anything it’s amazing they saw it through to the end of the Quadra