[bitwize]

> Microsoft Xenix (never knew more about it than the name).

For a year or two there, the only other commercial Unix workstation not made by Sun could be had from Radio Shack: the TRS-80 Model 16 running Xenix. Enough small businesses ran Xenix, with up to 3 simultaneous users on a single stock machine (console + 2 terminals) that Radio Shack kept supporting these things until the late 1980s; with up to an 8 MHz CPU, up to 7 MiB of RAM, and an actual (external) MMU, the Model 16 could handle more workload, theoretically more stably than an x86 machine running Xenix until about the time Xenix/386 came out.

[smackeyacky]

Apollo made competitive workstations at the time until they got swallowed by HP. The Unix workstation market was bigger than Sun, but since they were the most successful nobody remembers how competitive that segment was. The model 16 was a footnote not a competitor

[bitwize]

Apollo's Domain/OS (formerly AEGIS) was impressive, but did not gain a full POSIX layer until later in the 80s, as I understand it. So the Model 16 really was the only other commercial Unix workstation, besides Suns, in early 1983. This advantage wouldn't last long; by 1984 other Unix desktops like the HP Integral had emerged.

[pavlov]

I believe Apollo had a proprietary OS with limited Unix compatibility. So maybe the grandparent poster is right about the Model 16 being the only other non-Sun desktop Unix for a while, as long as you define Unix tightly enough.

[kjellsbells]

Sun gets the crown because prior to the sun/1 there wasnt really any such thing as a UNIX workstation. You had a terminal connected into a host running UNIX (or VMS) and that was that. My pet theory is that Sun succeeded against Apollo because Sun decided to sell to Wall St quants for their day job number crunching whereas Apollo (and later HPE) sold to engineers doing simulations and CAD. Naturally the quants told their colleagues and the stock went brrr.

Later entrants like SGI targeted their workstations at media creatives (helpfully, Apple were in crisis by this time so A/UX wasnt remotely a problem). IBM and DEC just produced me-too workstations but there was nothing special about AIX or Ultrix unless you were already a customer.

The UNIX wars of the 90s were basically the UNIX vendors trying to take over the whole market and not just their classic turf.