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Not really the "fault" of UNIX. The Lisp workstations would have been just as unpopular without it. They were insanely expensive and the idea of a workstation w
by Pay08 5mo ago
Not really the "fault" of UNIX. The Lisp workstations would have been just as unpopular without it. They were insanely expensive and the idea of a workstation was ahead of its time, not to mention the other "unneeded" extras like GUIs, a mouse, and the photo editing and 3D modelling suites. It was plainly uneconomical.
- pjmlp 5mo agoUNIX was only cheap because AT&T was forbidden to profit from it, had it not been the case, it would have been a proprietary closed source OS, exactly at similar price points. The proof being the graphical UNIX workstations from Cray, SGI, Sun, NeXT that came later into the market.
- Pay08 5mo agoThe dimension you're missing here is that most of the Lisp OSs were single-user (AFAIK initially all of them were but some gained multi-user support later) in a period when timeshare was king. Not to mention that the hardware itself cost multiple times more to manufacture.
- pjmlp 5mo agoHow many UNIX graphical workstations from Cray, SGI, Sun, NeXT do you think were multiuser in practice? As for price, they were also not cheap to get.
- jrumbut 5mo agoYou could probably say the same about any operating system, especially if you exclude the same human user operating in multiple roles. Though in the Unix environment, additional user accounts and groups that don't actually correspond to separate humans have a lot of pragmatic uses.
- pjmlp 5mo agoYes, however that wasn't a relevant feature for 1980-90's workstation market, like under which user the printer daemon would be running under.