On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Mohan Sundaram <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > Newbies or not, the world was moving towards a GUI based OS and Unix > fell woefully short there apart from not having desktop packages > (WYSIWYG). Unix remained a server operating system. It did have some > good GUI roots in Workstations. However, these were again tied to > hardware and developed by companies like Apollo and Sun. These not > being free of hardware was a distinct block to adoption wholesale. IBM > had thrown open hardware and PC compatibles market flourished. No Unix > on any one of them as the HW/SW markets were separated and > commoditised. At one level, this commoditisation did save costs as > compared to erstwhile proprietary systems. > Unix actually came to PCs fairly early, courtesy M$. They licensed and resold Xenix for PC/XTs and ATs almost from the beginning of the PC era, i.e. early 80s. After the 386 and 486 showed up, most Xenix users switched to SCO Unix (System V). However, very few of these installations were desktop installations running X - for that, you had to go with proprietary HW/SW platforms like SGI Iris/Irix, Sun, Apollo, HP-UX, IBM RS/6000/AIX, which were expensive. The domestic UNIX vendors (HCL, DCM, Wipro, SunRay, OMC, etc.) remained content with time-shared text-mode CLIs on serial terminals (VT100 clones). Godrej attempted a very ambitious desktop workstation running X on Unix for CAD/CAM applications, called the Symphony. It was a brilliant technical success, but did not succeed in the marketplace due to the usual reasons (lack of apps, etc.). Wipro also had a similar project that met the same fate in the late 80s. > Again, like I said earlier, this does not mean India could not have > spawned a whole new Unix based desktop generation. Could've done so > eminently. India did not believe in itself enough. We were content to > follow than to lead. > > There were good attempts, but the market was not ready for it. There was also a huge disaster in the form of CDAC, which sucked in a lot of system designers and programmers into building useless message-passing Transputer-based systems, when that competence should have been used for building an x86 SMP machine with maybe a BSD 4.2/3 port - which would have helped to develop Unix-internals competence. There were people with Unix competence in India, but there wasn't a huge market for Unix Workstations. However, a Govt.- funded project like C-DAC could just have addressed the HPC Unix market with an SMP 486 box, and later continued to ride the coat-tails of Intel (this is what Sequent did, and eventually they were acquired by IBM). > > > > This still does not explain why the organisations that had competence > > in Unix allowed this competence to lapse (for example, by "forgetting" > > to pass it on to the younger generation). > They had no control over this - an entire generation of experienced systems people (both HW and SW) moved to the US in the late 80s and early 90s. C-DAC made it worse by attracting talented freshers, but put them on a dead-end technology project where nothing worthwhile was developed. > Another > good example is NIC. In the 80s, this body adopted Xenix (MS's early > roots in Govt) for its deployments with an accent on smaller 4/5 > terminal PC based hardware. If it had chosen Unix and specified PCs as > the hardware platform, industry would've risen to the occasion like > they did in 1985. > > NIC is not to blame - their choice of Xenix and other UNIX flavours was sound . There were local vendors (HCL, DCM, etc.) that offered System V on x86 - but they were servers as discussed earlier. -Siva _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [email protected] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
