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Not quite. The UNIX wars were basically "Hardware" wars. Basically, you bought your workstation from Sun, or HP, or SGI, or IBM or whoever, and you got the ve

Not quite. The UNIX wars were basically "Hardware" wars. Basically, you bought your workstation from Sun, or HP, or SGI, or IBM or whoever, and you got the version of UNIX that was shipped for that hardware. You could compile your own BSD (/usr/ucb) or GNU (/usr/local) utils if you didn't want to pay a king's ransom for a compiler, but basically, the idea of running any type of software on any hardware, a la Linux or OpenBSD, hadn't really caught on. I know it's cool to be all blase about this, but this is different.

pjmlp 13y ago
That is only part of the picture. Many of us bear scars from trying to write portable software across commercial UNIX systems, while discovering that POSIX only covered part of the required features, and even the POSIX ones had implementation defined behaviours. Not to mention the wonders of each system having their own UI toolkits, besides each XWindows flavour. I did it between AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Xenix, DG/UX.