zlacker

Both stances are too extreme. Yes, the web didn't bring "dark times", it was adopted for sound reasons. But your view of Windows vs UNIX is equally far out. Until the web got good Windows vs UNIX was no contest for anything meant for ordinary users. To the extent MS was anti-competitive it was hurting Netscape and Apple, not UNIX:

• Until Linux, UNIX didn't even run on PCs at all, only expensive proprietary hardware. Windows ran on cheap machines made by a competitive market. Businesses wanted PCs for lots of reasons (e.g. Office).

• UNIX wasn't a single OS, it was many forks that were not compatible. You couldn't just write an app for UNIX, put it on CDs and sell it.

• Anything GUI related was terrible compared to Win32. Motif was the standard but cave man tech compared to what you could do on the client with Windows.

• UNIX was wildly more expensive.

• PCs had a thriving gaming culture. It meant people used the same tech at home as at work, creating a self-training workforce. UNIX vendors didn't care about games, they were too 'serious' for that. Their loss.

• Windows 95 did do pre-emptive multi-tasking, by the way. Only Win16 apps that hadn't been ported were cooperatively multi-tasked. Those apps didn't stick around very long because porting to Win32 was easy and Windows 95 was an absolute monster success. People queued up at midnight around the blocks of PC stores to buy it, it was so popular.

• Windows apps crashed a lot compared to UNIX apps because the average Windows machine ran way more apps than the average UNIX machine, ran on way lower quality hardware that was often flaky, had way more diversity of peripherals and configurations, and apps were deployed in places where it was hard to get crash logs (no networks).

• Windows machines didn't have uptimes of years because nobody cared. They were workstations. You turned them off at the end of the day when you went home because otherwise they'd burn their CRTs in and their lifetime was reduced. The culture of leaving non-server machines on all the time and never rebooting them only began once ACPI and other power management tech started to become common (something non-Apple UNIX struggles with to this day). And once it was useful to do so, Microsoft had a version of Windows that could have uptimes of months or years, no big deal.

>>mike_h+(OP)
"Until Linux, UNIX didn't even run on PCs at all, only expensive proprietary hardware"

Not true. There was Xenix, SCO, and Coherent as 3 examples off the top of my head.

>>nevera+nn
Yes! I ran Coherent 4.0 on a 386SX laptop when I was in high school (before moving to Linux.) Coherent had incredible documentation, something that is very rare today. I still remember that book with the shell on it, and learned a ton about systems administration and POSIX programming from it.

Here it is: https://archive.org/details/CoherentMan

>>nevera+nn
It did, but for their prices and hardware requirements I would rather use OS/2 instead.

>>nevera+nn
You're right, I'd forgotten about Xenix. Never heard of Coherent. SCO I thought was big iron but I'll take your word for it that I'm wrong about that. There sure were a lot of UNIX vendors back then!

>>pjmlp+zJ
Coherent was relatively cheap if you wanted a PC unix clone. $100 in 1992: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/coherent_unixalike_for_int...

>>icedch+2D1
That is the price for the software + the hardware to actually run it at an acceptable speed.

And all things being equal you could still get OS/2 as low as $49,

> The suggested introductory price of OS/2 2.0 is $139. However, the cost falls to $99 for users upgrading from DOS, which includes just about anyone, and to $49 for users who are willing to turn in their Microsoft version of Windows.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/21/science/personal-computer...

>>pjmlp+q83
True, OS/2 was much cheaper. Coherent was relatively cheap for a Unix clone, which is basically what I was getting at. SCO Xenix / Unix was in the $500+ range. A C compiler wasn't even included, if I recall.