5 ms·
I remember when we had more OS diversity. It was hell.
by baz00 3y ago
I remember when we had more OS diversity. It was hell.
- pjmlp 3y agoIt was great, we don't need UNIX monoculture.
- drekipus 3y agoYou mean a windows monoculture? Unix stuff has only recently been "in the norm" for dev related workflows, it used to be entirely Windows only. Same with office workflows, games (both playing and developing), graphics, etc. Unix is the rebel here. It is bringing the diversity. (Currently my workplace is probably 80% Mac, 19% Linux, 1% Windows, but I can see their point that it would be a lot easier to administrate if they were a monoculture of Mac).
- pjmlp 3y agoNo, I really mean UNIX monoculture. The world is bigger than the desktop.
- ryandrake 3y agoYea, let's not forget the dark times of the late 1990s / early 2000s. It was next to impossible to motivate developers to release software for more than Windows. Windows application software developers were thoroughly steeped in the platform. WinMain(), HINSTANCE, LPTSTR, CopyMemory(). Even for parts of code that did not require interacting with Win32, they'd reach for DWORD instead of unsigned int. The effort of porting these monstrosities to something non-Windows was enormous. As a junior engineer, I'd butt heads with my senior leads, arguing to keep the business logic in portable C and keep the "windows stuff" minimal and in its own cordoned-off directory. All the senior guys thought this was ridiculous--we would never have to port this to anything but Windows. Their idea of "portable" software was: It works on Windows 95 and Windows NT.
- pjmlp 3y agoYou mean the times of Aix, Solaris, HP-UX, NeXT, Mac OS, Amiga OS, Atari ST, Acorn, BeOS,AS/400, z/OS, Psion, Palm Pilot, Atari Portolio, Newton, ...?
- kergonath 3y agoAix, Atari, Amiga, Acorn, and BeOs were dead; Solaris, HP/UX, and NeXT were POSIX and had no applications except for highly specialised professional use cases; most of the rest were embedded platforms doing their own thing. None of them had any kind of meaningful market share. It was hell for Mac users because only the loyal developers from the previous decade remained. Windows was on something like 90% of home computers. I remember it very clearly, it was a Windows monoculture and it was fucking awful if you were on another platform.
- pjmlp 3y agoI bet you still write M$.... Already your assessment regarding AIX being dead, when it is one of survivors from UNIX/Linux wars shows how your Microsoft hate blinds your judgement.
- icedchai 3y agoAIX is alive-and-well in many enterprises. I know several companies in the gaming industry (casinos and lottery, not video games) that swear by AIX.
- dolmen 3y agoThe problem with OS diversity what that even UNIX wasn't a monoculture.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoIt was hell, but perhaps out of that hell was fashioned a sort of paradise. If the framers of the Internet had not been faced with disparate systems all speaking different languages and protocols, if they had not been introduced to computing as a babel of vendors all wanting to do their own thing, then perhaps they would not have longed for vendor-neutral, interoperable protocols, such as we have today. The drive in the 70s to hook up very different computing platforms and have them all talking to one another, that's what gave us the Internet today. Perhaps the choices in OS have diminished since the demise of proprietary systems and bespoke OS for so many platforms, but from where I sit, I still see a wide diversity of devices all connecting to the same Internet, all speaking the same protocol, and I'm thankful for that development.
- thwarted 3y agoThat desire to "do their own thing" moved to infect application layer, and today I have to have multiple different video chat clients installed to talk to ensure I can meet with anyone.