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Even Minix, which was (IMHO) worse than Unix Version 7, was popular at one point! What Torvalds started from. With the advent of i386, many people definitely wa

by bakul 4y ago

Even Minix, which was (IMHO) worse than Unix Version 7, was popular at one point! What Torvalds started from. With the advent of i386, many people definitely wanted something better than MSDOS or early Windows. If plan9 had been released as open source by 1992 things might’ve been very different.

rjsw 4y ago
You could buy commercial UNIX for the i386 in 1985, worked well, I ran one version on my home PC before switching to 386BSD 0.1 in 1992.
- bakul 4y ago
  No access to the sources was the difference.
  - rjsw 4y ago
    Sources were not available for MSDOS and Windows.
CogitoCogito 4y ago
Minix is arguably more popular than its ever been given its use in Intel chips' management engine.
- lproven 4y ago
  That's Minix 3. Minix 3 is a very different OS, with a different design, different goal, and different licence. It's very important to distinguish between them, or else you make statements that sound akin to "Anglo-Saxon is the main language of trade in the 21st century."
- unsafecast 4y ago
  That's unrelated. It's about what people use, not what a company decided is a good fit for an extremely domain-specific part of a system. Most people have no idea what MINIX is.
  - CogitoCogito 4y ago
    That's one way of looking at it. I guess by that line of reasoning Minix and Linux/BSD/etc. are also unpopular since they are effectively only used because companies decide it's a good fit for their system (relatively speaking there are very few such as myself that run Linux on their main system).
    - unsafecast 4y ago
      Yes, companies. A huge number of them. I'd argue that makes Linux and BSD quite successful/popular systems. My point was not that so much that it's a company, but that it's one company. I think measuring popularity by how many people chose it makes sense. Though popularity is a very weird measure. You have to also consider in what space it's popular. Linux, and especially BSDs, are unpopular in the consumer space, because not a lot of people chose it (even though a lot of people use it - consider IOS, Android, macOS, ChromeOS, PlayStation, et cetera). In contrast, Windows is rather unpopular in the server space, most choose Linux or some BSD.

by bakul 4y ago

rjsw 4y ago

You could buy commercial UNIX for the i386 in 1985, worked well, I ran one version on my home PC before switching to 386BSD 0.1 in 1992.

bakul 4y ago
No access to the sources was the difference.
- rjsw 4y ago
  Sources were not available for MSDOS and Windows.

CogitoCogito 4y ago

Minix is arguably more popular than its ever been given its use in Intel chips' management engine.

lproven 4y ago
That's Minix 3. Minix 3 is a very different OS, with a different design, different goal, and different licence. It's very important to distinguish between them, or else you make statements that sound akin to "Anglo-Saxon is the main language of trade in the 21st century."
unsafecast 4y ago
That's unrelated. It's about what people use, not what a company decided is a good fit for an extremely domain-specific part of a system. Most people have no idea what MINIX is.
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  That's one way of looking at it. I guess by that line of reasoning Minix and Linux/BSD/etc. are also unpopular since they are effectively only used because companies decide it's a good fit for their system (relatively speaking there are very few such as myself that run Linux on their main system).
  - unsafecast 4y ago
    Yes, companies. A huge number of them. I'd argue that makes Linux and BSD quite successful/popular systems. My point was not that so much that it's a company, but that it's one company. I think measuring popularity by how many people chose it makes sense. Though popularity is a very weird measure. You have to also consider in what space it's popular. Linux, and especially BSDs, are unpopular in the consumer space, because not a lot of people chose it (even though a lot of people use it - consider IOS, Android, macOS, ChromeOS, PlayStation, et cetera). In contrast, Windows is rather unpopular in the server space, most choose Linux or some BSD.