A Chronicle of the Unix Wars

The richest in archival materials tech video I've seen so far.

Not mentioning SGIs IRIX for at least few seconds is a crime.
They had a full version of doom to play with best sound coming from the machine as a demo disc.
OpenGL pioneers.

You mentioned SCO and Linux in passing – I suppose SCO's unsuccessful 20 year lawfare campaign to destroy Linux would be an entire video series in itself, but still might be worth a mention.

I was captured by the POSIX battalion in this war. I am still technically hostage. And have assimilated to the culture. No need to send help.

I started in 1986 with HP-UX or HP Unix and move don to become a Novell Netware specialist. Microsoft has become the de facto standard for business servers, not Linux.

12:36 the Intel 486 design engineers all had spark workstations under their desks. Most didn’t use the Motif GUI. They competed to make the most popular .csh files.

17:28 Developers, Developers, Developers

I'm a bit to young for UNIX. But I very much like NetBSD.

Bell Labs was a national treasure. So many nobel prizes and great discoveries…

Tldw: at&t got too greedy, lost the farm

Extremely interesting, as always, thanks a ton.
I always took Unix/Linux for granted, since the beginning of the internet age. I had no idea it had such a convoluted history.

Coming to this very much after the fact. What the hell were you all thinking?
Certainly not about the end user and how that would integrate with nerd systems.
Apple took that frontage but customer facing is only one element of the whole. The back end matters too. Reliability; Security; Trust

Stallman was never a professor, NextStep is actually based on Mach, you mispronounced Linus's name, the OSF group did OSF/1, Net/2 is more directly related to NetBSD… I dunno man, be more careful

"Six measly files" oh, how the times change (when money is involved). The Sun/Google Java/Android case centered basically entirely around whether Sun could copyright and trademark the function signatures of the Java specification; the very first line of each function that just tells you its name and what parameters and return values it has. Lines that, in and of themselves, execute no code whatsoever.

Great video though, I enjoyed it. It would be enjoyable to see your take on the entire long SCO Linux debacle.

17:28 😂 Good one

I worked at Bell Labs during this time. It was pretty chaotic. That was a great job! It may have been the peak for the greatest industrial R&D operation in history

What a trip down memory lane.

As a software developer of Unix-based systems for almost 40 years, I had a front-row seat at many of these events. I started working with SCO Xenix and SCO Unix, what a great bunch of guys, and was on a telephone call with them when the San Francisco earthquake struck. I worked extensively with so many of the Unix flavors; Sun (SunOS, Solaris), HP (HP-UX), IBM (AIX), Sequent (Dynix/ptx), Unisys, Dec, Unisys, Mips, Harris, etc, and then later Red Hat and other Linux varieties. I currently work with Ubuntu, MacOS, Android, and iOS, all Unix derivatives.

I built software that could easily be ported between the various Unix platforms. For the most part, the differences were fairly easily separated into modules, so porting was not such a problem.

I worked with an early version of Windows NT. At the time I detested Windows products but found NT to be excellent. It would clearly destroy Netware as NT did for free what Novell did for money.

Sun Microsystems was the best technology company I ever worked with. The products, software, and services were superb. The end of Sun Microsystems was a very sad day.

The Unix wars caused the players to lose sight of a useful end goal. While they were fighting tooth and nail, the resulting vacuum was filled by Windows NT and its later Windows derivatives.

Windows was dirt cheap, PCs were cheap enough to be affordable and so a cottage industry began of developers around the world working in their "garages", "tinkering" away with code, and building wonderful applications for a huge variety of uses. These applications were themselves very affordable. The market for these products exploded.

Unix, with its very expensive, vendor-specific hardware and non-standardized software could not compete. Unix had won the server but had lost the desktop.

Unix had failed to provide what the market wanted. It had to standardize Unix. It had to produce a standardized GUI with which applications could be quickly developed, as opposed to X-Windows which was dreadful, and Motif which was clunky.

Microsoft did not make these mistakes. In the end, it was Microsoft that had eaten AT&T's lunch.

Today, Unix is very much alive and well. It runs the internet, it is the server, it runs your smartphone, it is the preferred developer environment, and is the laptop/desktop of choice for so very many.

"Old programmers never die, they just lose their memory".

Personally I'm happy with where we ended up. The nonsense the Unix companies were pulling pushed everyone into the arms of Linux (we'll ignore Windows here…) and today we have a massive vibrant community with an OS used the word over on billions of devices.

No mention of sgi! 🙁

Next do an Apple-centric history of the transition from Classic Mac OS to OS X (now macOS) via NEXTSTEP. Also a brief mention/section on A/UX