5 ms·

UNIX was well provided for with GUIs all through the early 90s and later. The reason I knew Windows 3.1 was so primitive around 92-93 was that I had been using

UNIX was well provided for with GUIs all through the early 90s and later. The reason I knew Windows 3.1 was so primitive around 92-93 was that I had been using a GUI at least as advanced as Windows 98 would eventually become about 5 years later. (SVR4 in AT&T's UNIX, which then became Novell's UNIX ("Unixware"). At the same period Sun had its SunOS GUI (retrospectively renamed 'Solaris 1') and then its Solaris 2. My progression was Coherent (CLI) in 1991, followed by AT&T UNIX in 1992, Novell's Unixware in 1993, then Solaris 1 in 1994 and Solaris 2 from 1995 to 2001. (All my UNIXes from 1992 onwards had GUI Desktops. How else would I have used an Internet Browser called 'Mosaic'? I was a very early adopter of that new-fangled Internet. I been connected up since my Coherent days in 1991). By 2001 Linux had, for all intents and purposes, caught up with the commercial UNIXes.

anthk 5y ago
>By 2001 Linux had, for all intents and purposes, caught up with the commercial UNIXes. And even before, FVWM+RXVT ran circles around Solaris and CDE with most of the software being ported over: GCC, MESA, TCL, TK, commercial SGI tools... I know, I know, those tools and WM's already run everywhere, but most of the progress was on cheap X86 machines with limited RAM so many people even repurposed 486's with EvilWM, and lots of people were browsing the web with just Links/Lynx and the former 486. https://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ https://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ https://paparisa.unpatti.ac.id/linux_journal_archive_1994_2007/LJ/019/1091.html https://paparisa.unpatti.ac.id/linux_journal_archive_1994_20...
- pjmlp 5y ago
  No they didn't, CDE wasn't available for free, so the Linux community used what they could put their hands on. Using FVWM meant being stuck with Xlib and Athena Widgets, while Tcl/Tk was anyway a Sun project, with Tk not really being usable for anything that required graphics performance.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Solaris AND CDE, ofc Solaris bundled CDE. And Linux used FVWM + RXVT because it was a much faster alternative for common Unix work (cli and seldom graphical apps). Most people used X to run terminals and Netscape, and nothing else. And maybe Gnuplot and XV. On TK, ofc, but calling C from TCL was granted.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      I must have lived on an alternative universe with those HP-UX, Solaris and Aix applications. As for the rest I guess it has been a Linux thing since the start, given the CLI focus even to this day. Using fvwm meant having fun with Xlib + Athena Widgets, hardly usable. As for Tk, anything beyond providing a GUI to CLI did not escalate. DDD is probably the only surviving Tk GUI application that matters.
      - anthk 5y ago
        Wasn't DDD a Xaw3D application? On Tk software, Tkgate can be really useful. Also, you forgot TKinter for prototyping. Widely used. Well, on hardly usable... Netscape and a lot of software was statically linked and built against Motif, so most people ran commercial software in mid-late 90's well. A good FVWM+RXVT setup was as good as CDE, if not better because the CPU and RAM usage was far lower as I stated. I remember software like GV, mpg123, ImageMagick... far from unusable.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        twm was also usable, depending on the point of view. And being usable by whoever didn't want to put the money into real UNIXes, didn't mean that Xlib + Athena Widgets were something that one wishes to code for. I surely didn't, and yes I used plenty of Linux systems, starting with Slackware 2.0.
        anthk 5y ago
        Well, it was the 90's and even W95 was far more usable, Unixen were designed as to have a custom DE with highly customized settings even if CDE and Motif were the standard. On TWM, FVWM was much faster and lightweight. On high CPU loads TWM could be seen redrawing windows, something atrocious (ctwm fixed that a lot), and, well, as an example, you could code the core of your software in C and glue it to TCL/TK with relative ease. You had bindings and it was fast enough, much more than the pure TCL/TK.
Maursault 5y ago
> I was a very early adopter of that new-fangled Internet. I been connected up since my Coherent days in 1991 If you were a very early adopter of the Internet in 1991... then how should we describe the activities of Douglas Englebert or Vint Cerf 2 decades prior? 1983-85 I dialed into BBS, which was fun, but not as interesting as dialing up and logging into UF servers without credentials, exploring lists and exploiting resources when everyone was asleep. That was 6th-8th grades for me. In Fall of 1989 I was forced to purchase an expensive A/UX license, and I am still enamored with it. Then I was lost in desktop publishing for nearly a decade before my first IT jobs using NetWare in the late 1990s, to using (not admin) RedHat servers in 2001, which happened to coincide with Win2K and Mac OS X desktops I set my team up to use. I utterly spoiled them with 2 desktops each.
- simonblack 5y ago
  .. then how should we describe the activities of Douglas Englebert or Vint Cerf 2 decades prior? That's very true. In relative terms, I was an early adopter. I clearly remember the buzz that went around when somebody told us that there were now the unbelievable number of 'one million nodes on the Net'. That was four years or so before MSFT 'got religion' and turned on a dime to provide Web software. (Much as I dislike MSFT, that was really fantastic, fast work!) These days of course, a million nodes more or a million nodes less is merely 'daily noise level'.
  - Maursault 5y ago
    For whatever reason, no one uses "World Wide Web." You were an impressively very early adopter of the WWW, or web. Excuse me, please, I've trolled better.
Maursault 5y ago
> By 2001 Linux had, for all intents and purposes, caught up with the commercial UNIXes. No, I do not believe that is correct. That sounds like Penguinista revisionist history. Linux was quite usable yet still half-baked in 2001. In 2005, when IBM tried to switch everything over to Linux, there was a major revolt among AIX administrators that had numerous valid complaints, so even by 2005 Linux was not quite ready for prime time. By the end of 2008, the server install split was about 50/50 Linux/NetBSD. Everyone thinks Linux took over in 2008, but I think it was later, 2012. Linux was super popular without a reason to be. I still, today, do not see it as any better than NetBSD. Grassroots marketing by PC punks blanketing forum posts with nut bar verve made Linux popular, and not by its own merits. Linux is pop music.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Linux was popular because was fast on x86 hardware. And unlike BSD, all programs which came with the distribution worked. With ports you could get into a situation where one program would not compile or when it needed another library that the one installed which broke things. Also BSD wars turned a lot of developers away from BSD.
  - Maursault 5y ago
    > Linux was popular because was fast on x86 hardware. Because it booted fast? I don't understand that metric. We don't reboot servers. IMO Linux was a fad, but it faked it until it made it in 2008-2012. The death march of Sun had a lot to do with it. Linux, even today, never held a candle to the stability of any Sun system. > With ports you could get into a situation where one program would not compile or when it needed another library that the one installed which broke things. Comparing (I assume) apt to ports is Oranges to Apples. Ports is a source-based package management system. Apt is binary based. There are different goals here. > Also BSD wars turned a lot of developers away from BSD. What??! Did I miss the "BSD wars?" BSD won the UNIX wars prior to the Millennium. I'm not sure what you're saying. There'd be no GNU without BSD, and Linux would not be an operating system without GNU. Linux is more GNU than Linux.
- edgyquant 5y ago
pjmlp 5y ago
Yeah it had GUIs, painful as hell to program for. Only masochists can enjoy Xlib and Athena Widgets. And CDE? No thanks. Compared with Amiga, Windows 3.x and OS/2, UNIX has nothing to be proud about on the GUI chapter, other than outliers like NeXTSTEP or Irix, which in spite of CDE had other GUI capabilities on top. It was designed for and remains a CLI focused OS, with a graphics buffer on top without a coherent stack. As for Linux caughting up, until 2005 I only used Aix, HP-UX and Solaris in production. While at CERN Linux was being adopted as transition away from Solaris to run on the clusters (2003), everyone was either using Windows 2000 or the newly released OS X on their desktop/laptops. On my group I was one of the Scientific Linux early adopters, and yes in the context of running CMT, displaying Latex produced documents, Java based GUIs for the accelerators dashboards, or the same POSIX stuff as any other UNIX it was ok for the research workflows being done there. Ironically even in such contexts the large majority was either using Word or Framemaker for their papers.

anthk 5y ago

>By 2001 Linux had, for all intents and purposes, caught up with the commercial UNIXes. And even before, FVWM+RXVT ran circles around Solaris and CDE with most of the software being ported over: GCC, MESA, TCL, TK, commercial SGI tools... I know, I know, those tools and WM's already run everywhere, but most of the progress was on cheap X86 machines with limited RAM so many people even repurposed 486's with EvilWM, and lots of people were browsing the web with just Links/Lynx and the former 486. https://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ https://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ https://paparisa.unpatti.ac.id/linux_journal_archive_1994_2007/LJ/019/1091.html https://paparisa.unpatti.ac.id/linux_journal_archive_1994_20...

pjmlp 5y ago
No they didn't, CDE wasn't available for free, so the Linux community used what they could put their hands on. Using FVWM meant being stuck with Xlib and Athena Widgets, while Tcl/Tk was anyway a Sun project, with Tk not really being usable for anything that required graphics performance.
- anthk 5y ago
  Solaris AND CDE, ofc Solaris bundled CDE. And Linux used FVWM + RXVT because it was a much faster alternative for common Unix work (cli and seldom graphical apps). Most people used X to run terminals and Netscape, and nothing else. And maybe Gnuplot and XV. On TK, ofc, but calling C from TCL was granted.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    I must have lived on an alternative universe with those HP-UX, Solaris and Aix applications. As for the rest I guess it has been a Linux thing since the start, given the CLI focus even to this day. Using fvwm meant having fun with Xlib + Athena Widgets, hardly usable. As for Tk, anything beyond providing a GUI to CLI did not escalate. DDD is probably the only surviving Tk GUI application that matters.
    - anthk 5y ago
      Wasn't DDD a Xaw3D application? On Tk software, Tkgate can be really useful. Also, you forgot TKinter for prototyping. Widely used. Well, on hardly usable... Netscape and a lot of software was statically linked and built against Motif, so most people ran commercial software in mid-late 90's well. A good FVWM+RXVT setup was as good as CDE, if not better because the CPU and RAM usage was far lower as I stated. I remember software like GV, mpg123, ImageMagick... far from unusable.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        twm was also usable, depending on the point of view. And being usable by whoever didn't want to put the money into real UNIXes, didn't mean that Xlib + Athena Widgets were something that one wishes to code for. I surely didn't, and yes I used plenty of Linux systems, starting with Slackware 2.0.
        anthk 5y ago
        Well, it was the 90's and even W95 was far more usable, Unixen were designed as to have a custom DE with highly customized settings even if CDE and Motif were the standard. On TWM, FVWM was much faster and lightweight. On high CPU loads TWM could be seen redrawing windows, something atrocious (ctwm fixed that a lot), and, well, as an example, you could code the core of your software in C and glue it to TCL/TK with relative ease. You had bindings and it was fast enough, much more than the pure TCL/TK.

Maursault 5y ago

> I was a very early adopter of that new-fangled Internet. I been connected up since my Coherent days in 1991 If you were a very early adopter of the Internet in 1991... then how should we describe the activities of Douglas Englebert or Vint Cerf 2 decades prior? 1983-85 I dialed into BBS, which was fun, but not as interesting as dialing up and logging into UF servers without credentials, exploring lists and exploiting resources when everyone was asleep. That was 6th-8th grades for me. In Fall of 1989 I was forced to purchase an expensive A/UX license, and I am still enamored with it. Then I was lost in desktop publishing for nearly a decade before my first IT jobs using NetWare in the late 1990s, to using (not admin) RedHat servers in 2001, which happened to coincide with Win2K and Mac OS X desktops I set my team up to use. I utterly spoiled them with 2 desktops each.

simonblack 5y ago
.. then how should we describe the activities of Douglas Englebert or Vint Cerf 2 decades prior? That's very true. In relative terms, I was an early adopter. I clearly remember the buzz that went around when somebody told us that there were now the unbelievable number of 'one million nodes on the Net'. That was four years or so before MSFT 'got religion' and turned on a dime to provide Web software. (Much as I dislike MSFT, that was really fantastic, fast work!) These days of course, a million nodes more or a million nodes less is merely 'daily noise level'.
- Maursault 5y ago
  For whatever reason, no one uses "World Wide Web." You were an impressively very early adopter of the WWW, or web. Excuse me, please, I've trolled better.

Maursault 5y ago

> By 2001 Linux had, for all intents and purposes, caught up with the commercial UNIXes. No, I do not believe that is correct. That sounds like Penguinista revisionist history. Linux was quite usable yet still half-baked in 2001. In 2005, when IBM tried to switch everything over to Linux, there was a major revolt among AIX administrators that had numerous valid complaints, so even by 2005 Linux was not quite ready for prime time. By the end of 2008, the server install split was about 50/50 Linux/NetBSD. Everyone thinks Linux took over in 2008, but I think it was later, 2012. Linux was super popular without a reason to be. I still, today, do not see it as any better than NetBSD. Grassroots marketing by PC punks blanketing forum posts with nut bar verve made Linux popular, and not by its own merits. Linux is pop music.

hulitu 5y ago
Linux was popular because was fast on x86 hardware. And unlike BSD, all programs which came with the distribution worked. With ports you could get into a situation where one program would not compile or when it needed another library that the one installed which broke things. Also BSD wars turned a lot of developers away from BSD.
- Maursault 5y ago
  > Linux was popular because was fast on x86 hardware. Because it booted fast? I don't understand that metric. We don't reboot servers. IMO Linux was a fad, but it faked it until it made it in 2008-2012. The death march of Sun had a lot to do with it. Linux, even today, never held a candle to the stability of any Sun system. > With ports you could get into a situation where one program would not compile or when it needed another library that the one installed which broke things. Comparing (I assume) apt to ports is Oranges to Apples. Ports is a source-based package management system. Apt is binary based. There are different goals here. > Also BSD wars turned a lot of developers away from BSD. What??! Did I miss the "BSD wars?" BSD won the UNIX wars prior to the Millennium. I'm not sure what you're saying. There'd be no GNU without BSD, and Linux would not be an operating system without GNU. Linux is more GNU than Linux.
edgyquant 5y ago

pjmlp 5y ago

Yeah it had GUIs, painful as hell to program for. Only masochists can enjoy Xlib and Athena Widgets. And CDE? No thanks. Compared with Amiga, Windows 3.x and OS/2, UNIX has nothing to be proud about on the GUI chapter, other than outliers like NeXTSTEP or Irix, which in spite of CDE had other GUI capabilities on top. It was designed for and remains a CLI focused OS, with a graphics buffer on top without a coherent stack. As for Linux caughting up, until 2005 I only used Aix, HP-UX and Solaris in production. While at CERN Linux was being adopted as transition away from Solaris to run on the clusters (2003), everyone was either using Windows 2000 or the newly released OS X on their desktop/laptops. On my group I was one of the Scientific Linux early adopters, and yes in the context of running CMT, displaying Latex produced documents, Java based GUIs for the accelerators dashboards, or the same POSIX stuff as any other UNIX it was ok for the research workflows being done there. Ironically even in such contexts the large majority was either using Word or Framemaker for their papers.