On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 9:03 AM, Mohan Sundaram <[email protected]> wrote:
> Mosr GUI based vendors were > locked to proprietary hardware instead of adopting PC hardware. > One other issue is that decent megapixel-quality displays did not show up in the commodity PC market until the mid-90s. There were specialty add-on card manufacturers like Matrox, Number Nine, etc. in the 80s, but they were mainly addressing the high-end CAD/CAM market with cards priced at $10k and up, not the commodity desktop market. The commodity desktop market had only EGA and VGA cards at 640x480, and even the latter did not show up in quantity until the early '90s. Even if somebody had attempted a X/Unix port to x86 PCs in the mid/late '80s, there wasn't suitable commodity hardware to target it at. In any event, Linus and friends succeeded magnificently in doing exactly this in the early '90s - X/Linux on a 486 blew away almost all the proprietary desktop Unix workstations away by 1994/95, and the game was over for the likes of Apollo, Intergraph, SGI, Sun, etc. (though some of them survived by moving back into servers, ironically). > A body like NIC could've pushed industry for Unix on the low cost > desktop server with a Multi IO card - the market that Xenix and later > SCO Unix targetted. Prior to 1985 (when the PC/AT was introduced) this was not really feasible. Sure, you could put a multi I/O card on a PC/XT (8-bit bus) and hook up 3-4 terminals on COM1: to COM4:. But with 640k of RAM, no MMU, no Virtual Memory and CLI-only apps, it was fairly limited. The only multitasking OSes that could even work here were CCPM and maybe early versions of Xenix. Maybe also a System 7 derivative from IBM called PC/IX (which was in no way comparable to AIX which showed up later on the RT/PC). I even tried this in 1986 with the PC/AT at 6 MHz and 1.5 Mbytes of RAM, equipped with a multi-IO card. Oddly enough, I liked QNX (an RTOS) and CCPM better than Xenix (which came on 20+ floppies, CDROM drives only showed up in the late 80s.) on a i286. A 3/4 BSD port to the i286 was not really feasible because of its limited MMU. Nevertheless, several people attempted it - Mark William's Coherent, etc. After the i386 CPU was released in 1985/6, there was a version of SunOS that ran on a 386 - the Sun 386i, a proprietary x86 box. But shortly thereafter, SCO System V showed up for commodity i386 boxes, and the Indian UNIX market generally adopted it. > We had leapfrogged with Unix adoption. I believe > we should've persisted and built around it. > > Agreed, but DOS/Netware on PCs was also a low-cost CLI option. Many of the CLI apps originally written for text- mode UNIX ported easily to DOS, and DOS was bulletproof even on entry-level HW. That's what finally killed Unix in India - DOS was good enough, at a fraction of the cost. Those DOS apps continued to work fine in a DOS window on Win95, so there was no incentive to switch back to UNIX. Anyway, the wheel has turned a full circle now, and Linux is getting significant traction. -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
