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Does any older folk here remembers when NT was the Cool New Thing (TM) and it had by design support to multiple subsystems plopped over the NT API, and Win32 wa

Does any older folk here remembers when NT was the Cool New Thing (TM) and it had by design support to multiple subsystems plopped over the NT API, and Win32 was just one of them alongside POSIX (Interix) and OS/2? There was even a _very short_ time span when Interix was actually usable (it was extremely short though)

pjmlp 4mo ago
Yes, the only reason I cared for Linux in first place was that the POSIX support wasn't that good. I am convinced that if POSIX subsystem was UNIX serious, GNU/Linux would never taken off on PC, and the whole would be divided between SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, Aix and Windows NT.
- hnlmorg 4mo ago
  There were already better free options than Linux when Linux first started gaining traction. The reason Linux grew in the 90s was because it was part of the hacker culture. Not because better options didn’t exist. Kids liked the fact that Linux was a free-for-all, anything-goes, platform. It wasn’t stuffy like Unix and it wasn’t proprietary like Windows. Then those kids grew up and became decision makers themselves. And we started to see Linux replace FreeBSD and commercial Unixes.
  - pjmlp 4mo ago
    Which ones? BSD was tied in a lawsuit that left doubts on its future. Minix was a toy OS for university teachings. Coherent was commercial. Nothing else was there on the PC market.
    - hnlmorg 4mo ago
      386BSD and its derivatives (eg FreeBSD) weren’t really attacked by SCO like other UNIXes were. In fact SCO filed more lawsuits against Linux than they did (for example) FreeBSD. FreeBSD was also used heavily in the late 90s in ISPs and similar domains.
      - pjmlp 4mo ago
        Those only came to be after AT&T lawsuit was cleared, and by then Linux already had enough wind behind it. Also SCO lawsuit was more due to IBM's money than Linux. Both a different situation than Windows NT being available a decade earlier.
        hnlmorg 4mo ago
        You’re sidestepping my point that FreeBSD was in widespread use in the 90s. My point about SCO wasn’t clear though. I was just saying FreeBSD wasn’t as embroiled in the UNIX wars as the others, ie referencing SCO vs Linux to demonstrate how even Linux suffered more time in the courts than FreeBSD did.
        pjmlp 4mo ago
        Not at all, except for Hotmail and Yahoo, I never saw it being used personally. In fact, had I not bought a set of Walnut Creek CD-ROMs, I would never had used it in first place, and never again since those days, excluding derivatives like macOS and Orbis OS. Which is why I asserted with good POSIX support, the world today probably would be Windows NT linage on the PCs, plus the commercial UNIXes everywhere else.
        hnlmorg 4mo ago
        You work for mainly Windows shops though don’t you? My experience was very different in the 90s. Solaris, FreeBSD and Next were very widely used. The only times I saw NT was in edu, government, and a random publishing house (which ran pirated copies of NT 4 on the servers and Mac OS 8 everywhere else). That publisher is an interesting chapter in my career on its own actually…
      - manithree 4mo ago
        Nobody said SCO sued BSD or BSD users. USL sued BSD and UC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....) long before the SCO lawsuits.
  - nyrikki 4mo ago
    Actually Linux was very SysV like back in the day, so it was more like the stuffy OS's that people liked. GCC was the real catalyst, With even SUN which had used bundled dev tools as a early selling point was unbundling them and charging more, many x86 UNIXes like SCO didn't even come with a tcp/ip stack without an extra fee...and you couldn't take C code from HP to another system and actually have it compile. As Solaris is really just a sysV-ification of the bsdish sunOs...the introduction of posix as a least common denominator, and Linux being closer to the commercial-ish unixes it was just an easier sell for a lot of users. In hindsight it may seem silly, but in may projects I was involved with, linux using sysV /etc/init.d/, vs BSD's /etc/rc.conf was the driving factor, because /etc/rc.conf was a shared dependency and harder for us to modularize projects. IMHO the real Linux advantage is that it was using the gnu user land, and thus gcc worked well with it and companies started to sell commercial support early. But there were still flavor wars from all sides all the time, and being an ex-op on #unix and #unixhelp from the 1990s, I dealt with them all. But BSD and heck even ITS etc... was the free-for-all, anything-goes, platform of record.
    - hnlmorg 4mo ago
      You’re talking about architecture but I was talking about development culture. Linux encouraged people to fork and experiment with it. Whereas the FreeBSD was a carefully maintained ecosystem.
    - qalmakka 4mo ago
      > IMHO the real Linux advantage is that it was using the gnu user land, and thus gcc worked well with it and companies started to sell commercial support early. IMHO what really differentiated Linux were a. the bazaar development approach, which lowered barriers to contribution, felt more transparent and "safer" with regards to what was going on in kernel land b. the GPL, which while annoying to certain companies due to its viral nature, it at least guaranteed that no competitor could just develop a major innovation, grab the kernel and all of your contributions and run with them, undercutting you in the process and also a noteworthy mention was the fact the BSDs were basically sabotaged by AT&T via their nefarious set of lawsuits, which nipped in the bud any semblance of advantage they had
- qalmakka 4mo ago
  The BSDs would be much bigger today if it wasn't for AT&T going after them hard in the early '90s, exactly when both them and Linux were starting to take up speed. I think that things could have gone way different if the BSDs were bigger and more popular, in quite unpredictable ways (it's not like they haven't been popular anyway though - see Darwin, or the Playstation OS for instance)
naishoya 4mo ago
I guess that makes me square within the 'older folk' subset - I continued to use the NT core with LiteSTEP alongside the SGI/IRIX Octane2 well after Y2K. Those days I was working on a rework of the TRO PLATO learning system which was a real beast but essential for the individual learning project of a charter school i was supporting. PLATO had been taken from it's dedicated mainframe world and made 'runnable' on W95 workstations with an NT server - but it really didn't run well, and the kids could really get behind the interface into regular Windows environment too readily. In combination the workstations were crazy hard to keep running cleanly. So in the end; we had to take the software out of Windows, wash it clean in the waters of Silicon Graphics System-V with BSD extensions (X11) Unix and BSD - NeXTSTEP, just so we could bring it back to Windows properly using LiteStep. Life happened and I lost touch with the outcome of it all, moving on to my next project; but, I kept a LiteSTEP desktop until moving entirely over to Linux in 2004. Haven't used Windows for anything but a gaming load since '05 and stopped doing even that in about 2010, nothing later than XP.
- porl 4mo ago
  I loved LiteSTEP! It was the only thing that kept me sane on the work machine I was stuck using at the time
- musicale 4mo ago
  I would like a modern runnable version of PLATO.

pjmlp 4mo ago

Yes, the only reason I cared for Linux in first place was that the POSIX support wasn't that good. I am convinced that if POSIX subsystem was UNIX serious, GNU/Linux would never taken off on PC, and the whole would be divided between SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, Aix and Windows NT.

hnlmorg 4mo ago
There were already better free options than Linux when Linux first started gaining traction. The reason Linux grew in the 90s was because it was part of the hacker culture. Not because better options didn’t exist. Kids liked the fact that Linux was a free-for-all, anything-goes, platform. It wasn’t stuffy like Unix and it wasn’t proprietary like Windows. Then those kids grew up and became decision makers themselves. And we started to see Linux replace FreeBSD and commercial Unixes.
- pjmlp 4mo ago
  Which ones? BSD was tied in a lawsuit that left doubts on its future. Minix was a toy OS for university teachings. Coherent was commercial. Nothing else was there on the PC market.
  - hnlmorg 4mo ago
    386BSD and its derivatives (eg FreeBSD) weren’t really attacked by SCO like other UNIXes were. In fact SCO filed more lawsuits against Linux than they did (for example) FreeBSD. FreeBSD was also used heavily in the late 90s in ISPs and similar domains.
    - pjmlp 4mo ago
      Those only came to be after AT&T lawsuit was cleared, and by then Linux already had enough wind behind it. Also SCO lawsuit was more due to IBM's money than Linux. Both a different situation than Windows NT being available a decade earlier.
      - hnlmorg 4mo ago
        You’re sidestepping my point that FreeBSD was in widespread use in the 90s. My point about SCO wasn’t clear though. I was just saying FreeBSD wasn’t as embroiled in the UNIX wars as the others, ie referencing SCO vs Linux to demonstrate how even Linux suffered more time in the courts than FreeBSD did.
        pjmlp 4mo ago
        Not at all, except for Hotmail and Yahoo, I never saw it being used personally. In fact, had I not bought a set of Walnut Creek CD-ROMs, I would never had used it in first place, and never again since those days, excluding derivatives like macOS and Orbis OS. Which is why I asserted with good POSIX support, the world today probably would be Windows NT linage on the PCs, plus the commercial UNIXes everywhere else.
        hnlmorg 4mo ago
        You work for mainly Windows shops though don’t you? My experience was very different in the 90s. Solaris, FreeBSD and Next were very widely used. The only times I saw NT was in edu, government, and a random publishing house (which ran pirated copies of NT 4 on the servers and Mac OS 8 everywhere else). That publisher is an interesting chapter in my career on its own actually…
    - manithree 4mo ago
      Nobody said SCO sued BSD or BSD users. USL sued BSD and UC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....) long before the SCO lawsuits.
- nyrikki 4mo ago
  Actually Linux was very SysV like back in the day, so it was more like the stuffy OS's that people liked. GCC was the real catalyst, With even SUN which had used bundled dev tools as a early selling point was unbundling them and charging more, many x86 UNIXes like SCO didn't even come with a tcp/ip stack without an extra fee...and you couldn't take C code from HP to another system and actually have it compile. As Solaris is really just a sysV-ification of the bsdish sunOs...the introduction of posix as a least common denominator, and Linux being closer to the commercial-ish unixes it was just an easier sell for a lot of users. In hindsight it may seem silly, but in may projects I was involved with, linux using sysV /etc/init.d/, vs BSD's /etc/rc.conf was the driving factor, because /etc/rc.conf was a shared dependency and harder for us to modularize projects. IMHO the real Linux advantage is that it was using the gnu user land, and thus gcc worked well with it and companies started to sell commercial support early. But there were still flavor wars from all sides all the time, and being an ex-op on #unix and #unixhelp from the 1990s, I dealt with them all. But BSD and heck even ITS etc... was the free-for-all, anything-goes, platform of record.
  - hnlmorg 4mo ago
    You’re talking about architecture but I was talking about development culture. Linux encouraged people to fork and experiment with it. Whereas the FreeBSD was a carefully maintained ecosystem.
  - qalmakka 4mo ago
    > IMHO the real Linux advantage is that it was using the gnu user land, and thus gcc worked well with it and companies started to sell commercial support early. IMHO what really differentiated Linux were a. the bazaar development approach, which lowered barriers to contribution, felt more transparent and "safer" with regards to what was going on in kernel land b. the GPL, which while annoying to certain companies due to its viral nature, it at least guaranteed that no competitor could just develop a major innovation, grab the kernel and all of your contributions and run with them, undercutting you in the process and also a noteworthy mention was the fact the BSDs were basically sabotaged by AT&T via their nefarious set of lawsuits, which nipped in the bud any semblance of advantage they had
qalmakka 4mo ago
The BSDs would be much bigger today if it wasn't for AT&T going after them hard in the early '90s, exactly when both them and Linux were starting to take up speed. I think that things could have gone way different if the BSDs were bigger and more popular, in quite unpredictable ways (it's not like they haven't been popular anyway though - see Darwin, or the Playstation OS for instance)

naishoya 4mo ago

I guess that makes me square within the 'older folk' subset - I continued to use the NT core with LiteSTEP alongside the SGI/IRIX Octane2 well after Y2K. Those days I was working on a rework of the TRO PLATO learning system which was a real beast but essential for the individual learning project of a charter school i was supporting. PLATO had been taken from it's dedicated mainframe world and made 'runnable' on W95 workstations with an NT server - but it really didn't run well, and the kids could really get behind the interface into regular Windows environment too readily. In combination the workstations were crazy hard to keep running cleanly. So in the end; we had to take the software out of Windows, wash it clean in the waters of Silicon Graphics System-V with BSD extensions (X11) Unix and BSD - NeXTSTEP, just so we could bring it back to Windows properly using LiteStep. Life happened and I lost touch with the outcome of it all, moving on to my next project; but, I kept a LiteSTEP desktop until moving entirely over to Linux in 2004. Haven't used Windows for anything but a gaming load since '05 and stopped doing even that in about 2010, nothing later than XP.

porl 4mo ago
I loved LiteSTEP! It was the only thing that kept me sane on the work machine I was stuck using at the time
musicale 4mo ago
I would like a modern runnable version of PLATO.