[qalmakka]

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)

[naishoya]

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]

I loved LiteSTEP! It was the only thing that kept me sane on the work machine I was stuck using at the time

[musicale]

I would like a modern runnable version of PLATO.

[pjmlp]

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]

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.

[nyrikki]

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.

[qalmakka]

> 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

[hnlmorg]

> 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

People keep saying that but I saw zero evidence of those lawsuits factoring into any purchasing decisions that customers made.

I saw Solaris SPARK servers purchased for running Informix RDBMS

I saw Solaris deployed for payroll systems running Oracle middleware.

I saw FreeBSD servers built for web hosting

I saw FreeBSD servers built for ISP backend services

But at no point in the 90s did I see anyone running Linux commercially. In fact the only reason I ran Linux (Slackware) in the 90s was to see what all the fuss was about from my nerdy younger peers on IRC. And even then, I just threw it on a desktop PC.

In the 90s you had NextStep workstations used to build games intended for PCs (like Id Software did with Doom and Quake). And used at CERN for the development of the WWW.

UNIX was the 90s platform of choice for computer animation. It was the platform of choice for multi-tenant web hosting. And so on and so forth.

Much as Linux had the cool hacker community, 90s UNIX systems had superior ACLs, containerisation, faster TCP/IP stacks, significantly more stable file system drivers and so on and so forth. So people naturally chose UNIX for their important systems. And that’s exactly the trend I personally experienced in the 90s.

This isn’t to say that I think the unix wars had “zero effect” on the decline of unix, but I do personally think the amount of impact it had is massively overestimated. I think Linux would have taken over regardless because the Linux culture embraced everyone’s weird ideas vs UNIX systems that did extensive gatekeeping. And the kids that played with Linux because it was fun and hacking was encouraged, grew up and became influential in decision making.

I think the culture of Linux had more to do with Linux’s growth than anything else.

Personally, I don’t think the license made any difference here. I do get the arguments people make about GPL, but GPL was around since before Linux and it didn’t gain significant traction then. But like most of the opinions I’ve shared above, it’s an impossible point to prove either way.

[hnlmorg]

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.

[pjmlp]

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]

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.

[nyrikki]

I think you are a possibly a decade off on the timing here.

USL v. BSDi is what impacted the BSD side, and it was during that lawsuit before Novell bought USL etc.... that the problems were that allowed Linux to make gains while the net/2 distros were in a waiting game IMHO.

The timing absolutely helped Linux and GNU being packaged as a complete system by the various distros etc..., and common OSS distribution points like Walnut Creek and PHT were very much concerned about USL v. BSDi and in an era when you had to make long distance phone calls to download with a modem, a lack of CDroms etc... absolutely caused a dip in adoption of the BSDs.

By the time the IBM v. SCO lawsuits happened (2003) the UNIX wars were long gone and Linux was already established.

SCO/Interactive/Coherent/etc... and other x86ish UNIXes were quite common in my work in the early 1990s, but the whole unix wars is way to complicated to cover in a single post.

The post .com bubble SCO lawsuits really just didn't matter much, the consolidation that happened in the early 90's that ended the UNIX wars, plus Intel killing most of the commercial unix independent CPUs with Itanium untruths and impossible promises and an inability for the major vendors to adapt to a lower margin model etc... killed those off.

The SCO lawsuits were really just the flailing of a dyeing company which was the end result of WordPerfect buying Novell with Novells money and local Utah politics.

[hnlmorg]

Sorry, I don’t think my point was very clear. I wasn’t saying that SCO sued Linux in the 90s nor that the UNIX wars had zero impact.

Just that FreeBSD was still used a lot in the 90s and managed (at least from what I experienced) to dodge most of the concerns that companies had deploying other UNIXes.

I mean, it’s not like UNIX use dropped to zero overnight.

So you did see a lot of Internet companies using FreeBSD as their platform of choice. For a while, it really did look like FreeBSD was becoming the dominant server platform in that domain. Not everyone too Linux serious at that time. It wasn’t until at least 99 when Linux became a viable competitor to FreeBSD.

But once Linux did gain favour its popularity sky rocketed. Which is exactly why SCO took various Linux shops to court.

[manithree]

Nobody said SCO sued BSD or BSD users. USL sued BSD and UC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....) long before the SCO lawsuits.

[hnlmorg]

Even in that case, it was one suit and it was settled before FreeBSD was ever released.

Which simply wasn’t enough drama to persuade businesses on smaller budgets away from using FreeBSD.

[pjmlp]

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]

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.

[qalmakka]

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)