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All these 1990s Unix workstations lacked polish compared to Mac OS too. They were rock solid stable whereas Mac OS 9 was incredibly unstable back in the 1990s.

All these 1990s Unix workstations lacked polish compared to Mac OS too. They were rock solid stable whereas Mac OS 9 was incredibly unstable back in the 1990s. But usability for the user was atrocious on a lot of these machines, and they were often 10x more expensive than a PC or Mac. Linux was already more "polished" than most of these commercial Unix machines by 1996-1997. I used SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix, DEC Unix, SCO, and more in one of my first jobs. Back then those Unix machines were all desktops. So was linux for the most part, although it was certainly possible to setup a Linux laptop by then. A lot of the stuff that Linux lags on today compared to Mac OS like graphics acceleration, power management, battery life, external/internal monitor switching, etc.. were kind of irrelevant back then as the machines just sat on a desk and you didn't move them around, there was no wireless, and graphics acceleration was in it's infancy. (You could get accelerators on the Unix machines but they cost 10s of thousands.) But out of the box a bunch of those Unix workstations would have stupidly broken stuff and you'd be spending a bunch of time fixing configuration and installing software before you could feel productive on the machines. Stupid stuff like opening a terminal and the key mappings were not even configured! You'd try to do something and even the backspace key would be broken. IRIX was the most polished in my memory. The last Sun machine I had at work was in 2003-2004. But I was doing a lot on Windows at that point. It was a few more years before places I worked started realizing OSX could do it all. Around 2010 or so I remember being shocked when we dropped support for Solaris for the product I worked on. When we had first started supporting linux (something I had worked on) it was edgy, just a few years laster all the customers had dropped all the commercial unix variants and only wanted linux support.

wil421 4y ago
Yes, I used Mac OS 9 and it was terrible. I used Macs in school and a good friend had one. It was only slightly worse than windows at the time. OS 9 crashed nonstop. I was too young for Unix workstations. My only experience with them was a graybeard system admin who still had 2 Sparq workstations running something under his desk. Around 2015 they finally replaced the service it was running. I’m pretty sure he took them home to add to his collection.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pjmlp 4y ago
I used Linux at home since 1995's Summer (dual boot), and at work I only started using GNU/Linux in any kind of serious workload while at CERN in 2002, until then Aix, HP-UX, and Solaris were our workhorses, alongside Windows NT/2000. At CERN back in 2002, most people were transitioning to OS X and Windows 2000 from Solaris pizza boxes, largely leaving GNU/Linux for the server room. Scientific Linux was their very first supported version, back in 2004. Nokia Networks only started the transition of HP-UX into GNU/Linux around 2005, and even then, HP-UX was still supported for quite some time until the final switch took place.
saltcured 4y ago
For me, the workstation was always the more local, personalized door to the scalable compute environment. It could run more convenient or pretty tools, but was a compute environment for my own programming. The other kind of workstation environment, dedicated to CAD or other canned applications, was not very relevant to me. But, I did realize that market was eroding to Windows NT and therefore undermining the revenue streams of the Unix vendors. I learned that my needs do not always align with the population at large, and I should be aware what is happening but not slavishly follow the common wisdom or marketing. I also learned about open source and free software and realized how costly the commercial software treadmill is, with constant obsolescence. I learned to see the open source world as a living process that I could contribute to and rely upon. I built my career in parallel with the rise of Linux, writing open source software. To this day, I go out of my way to use free and open source tools and treat commercial software like a hazardous material. I started using Linux in college in the very early days around 1993. I quickly became a full-time Linux user, and have essentially never had a personal nor work computer with Windows nor Mac OS since then. They are both alien platforms to me. I have often had Windows in a VM for the occasional use of some proprietary program, but I feel like a fish out of water when I touch it. In college, we had many flavors of Unix workstations and shared servers with terminal farms. We also had a local culture of BSD usage by the self-appointed CS hacker/gatekeepers, and they looked down on Linux. But, I found that my home PC with Linux was sufficient for most of my coursework and saved me from crunch times when labs were oversubscribed. I also brought Linux with me to work. In 1996 I already knew a PC running Linux was a better "workstation" for me than the Unix machines my university habitually purchased. I can still remember a crappy Dell laptop with a Pentium MMX which outperformed a Sun Ultra in my real everyday work with compilers, insane autoconf+makefile build systems, etc. At the same time, I was very aware of the Linux HPC developments going on in the US national labs and anticipated the increase relevance of Linux. My early job years included maintenance and porting of C based libraries to many Unix HPC platforms. I made sure it also worked on Linux. I tested Linux on my own hardware and also used remote resources in our building or at various US supercomputing centers for the other ports. I have now forgotten some of the OS names, but it included HPC variants from IBM, HP, SGI, Cray, etc. I even got mileage out of Linux on my personal DEC Multia (alpha) to do initial 64-bit porting before re-testing and finalizing on various remote platforms. I was an early/beta user of so many frontiers of Linux. I learned that the community would rapidly adapt to new requirements as they appeared, and I found this very reliable tooling for my career. I was there for the early 2D graphics acceleration, the switch to SMP, the early 3D acceleration, and various changes to allow large storage, large files, and fast networking. Through work, I was also an early adopter/tester of qemu-kvm virtualization. Previously, VMware was one of the rare proprietary programs I used on Linux.
tssva 4y ago
> Back then those Unix machines were all desktops. So was linux for the most part, although it was certainly possible to setup a Linux laptop by then. Not quite all Unix machines were desktops. Tadpole made the SPARCbook line of laptops which ran SunOS/Solaris. In conjunction with IBM they made a PowerPC RS6000 laptop for IBM which ran AIX. They also made the ALPHAbook 1 laptop which initially shipped with OpenVMS. I'm not sure if it lasted long enough to get the planned port of DEC UNIX. At the time I tried to convince my employer to purchase a ALPHAbook for me, but before that decision was made I left never to touch an OpenVMS system again.

wil421 4y ago

Yes, I used Mac OS 9 and it was terrible. I used Macs in school and a good friend had one. It was only slightly worse than windows at the time. OS 9 crashed nonstop. I was too young for Unix workstations. My only experience with them was a graybeard system admin who still had 2 Sparq workstations running something under his desk. Around 2015 they finally replaced the service it was running. I’m pretty sure he took them home to add to his collection.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

pjmlp 4y ago

I used Linux at home since 1995's Summer (dual boot), and at work I only started using GNU/Linux in any kind of serious workload while at CERN in 2002, until then Aix, HP-UX, and Solaris were our workhorses, alongside Windows NT/2000. At CERN back in 2002, most people were transitioning to OS X and Windows 2000 from Solaris pizza boxes, largely leaving GNU/Linux for the server room. Scientific Linux was their very first supported version, back in 2004. Nokia Networks only started the transition of HP-UX into GNU/Linux around 2005, and even then, HP-UX was still supported for quite some time until the final switch took place.

saltcured 4y ago

For me, the workstation was always the more local, personalized door to the scalable compute environment. It could run more convenient or pretty tools, but was a compute environment for my own programming. The other kind of workstation environment, dedicated to CAD or other canned applications, was not very relevant to me. But, I did realize that market was eroding to Windows NT and therefore undermining the revenue streams of the Unix vendors. I learned that my needs do not always align with the population at large, and I should be aware what is happening but not slavishly follow the common wisdom or marketing. I also learned about open source and free software and realized how costly the commercial software treadmill is, with constant obsolescence. I learned to see the open source world as a living process that I could contribute to and rely upon. I built my career in parallel with the rise of Linux, writing open source software. To this day, I go out of my way to use free and open source tools and treat commercial software like a hazardous material. I started using Linux in college in the very early days around 1993. I quickly became a full-time Linux user, and have essentially never had a personal nor work computer with Windows nor Mac OS since then. They are both alien platforms to me. I have often had Windows in a VM for the occasional use of some proprietary program, but I feel like a fish out of water when I touch it. In college, we had many flavors of Unix workstations and shared servers with terminal farms. We also had a local culture of BSD usage by the self-appointed CS hacker/gatekeepers, and they looked down on Linux. But, I found that my home PC with Linux was sufficient for most of my coursework and saved me from crunch times when labs were oversubscribed. I also brought Linux with me to work. In 1996 I already knew a PC running Linux was a better "workstation" for me than the Unix machines my university habitually purchased. I can still remember a crappy Dell laptop with a Pentium MMX which outperformed a Sun Ultra in my real everyday work with compilers, insane autoconf+makefile build systems, etc. At the same time, I was very aware of the Linux HPC developments going on in the US national labs and anticipated the increase relevance of Linux. My early job years included maintenance and porting of C based libraries to many Unix HPC platforms. I made sure it also worked on Linux. I tested Linux on my own hardware and also used remote resources in our building or at various US supercomputing centers for the other ports. I have now forgotten some of the OS names, but it included HPC variants from IBM, HP, SGI, Cray, etc. I even got mileage out of Linux on my personal DEC Multia (alpha) to do initial 64-bit porting before re-testing and finalizing on various remote platforms. I was an early/beta user of so many frontiers of Linux. I learned that the community would rapidly adapt to new requirements as they appeared, and I found this very reliable tooling for my career. I was there for the early 2D graphics acceleration, the switch to SMP, the early 3D acceleration, and various changes to allow large storage, large files, and fast networking. Through work, I was also an early adopter/tester of qemu-kvm virtualization. Previously, VMware was one of the rare proprietary programs I used on Linux.

tssva 4y ago

> Back then those Unix machines were all desktops. So was linux for the most part, although it was certainly possible to setup a Linux laptop by then. Not quite all Unix machines were desktops. Tadpole made the SPARCbook line of laptops which ran SunOS/Solaris. In conjunction with IBM they made a PowerPC RS6000 laptop for IBM which ran AIX. They also made the ALPHAbook 1 laptop which initially shipped with OpenVMS. I'm not sure if it lasted long enough to get the planned port of DEC UNIX. At the time I tried to convince my employer to purchase a ALPHAbook for me, but before that decision was made I left never to touch an OpenVMS system again.