Whenever I think back on this era in computing history, I think it's almost miraculous that I get to work on a UNIX(ish) system (Linux). The incredible hubris of so many of the companies involved in UNIX back then, and the greedy grasping over scraps, rather than focusing on growing the market and interoperability, is astonishing. Sure, they eventually recognized the massive failure and founded some things with "Open" in the name, to at least present the illusion of "getting it". But, the reality is that it took actual Open Source to save UNIX from being yet another also-ran system. And, it almost seems like an accident of history that we have Linux (I mean, what if Linus hadn't posted what he did when he did about his little "toy" OS, and what if several others hadn't started sending patches?).
I also occasionally wonder what has been lost to similar accidents of history. I know there are folks out there who considered UNIX inferior to VMS, for example. What if VMS had been subject to the same licensing quirk that UNIX was and was able to be produced by many vendors and eventually and Open Source version? Would we be using "Livax" today?
I mean, what if Linus hadn't posted what he did when he did about his little "toy" OS, and what if several others hadn't started sending patches?
I know what you mean but I think we have to remember that this was when BSD was being hit up with legal threats from AT&T that eventually went nowhere and the GNU folks were quite busy.
I know HURD is considered the Duke Nukem of kernels now but I have to imagine that if not for Linus we'd either be using BSD a lot more than we do or that GNU or some other hypothetical player would have implemented a free kernel to run GNU on top of.
But you're right on, it's amazing anyone made any progress on Unix during the Dark Ages described in the article...
> I mean, what if Linus hadn't posted what he did when he did about his little "toy" OS, and what if several others hadn't started sending patches?
In addition to what's been said about BSD and Hurd, Minix could also have spawned a directly related Free Software variant (Torvalds had access to Minix and used it but Linux isn't really based on it), and someone else entirely could have done essentially the same thing as Torvalds.
Torvalds and, therefore, Linux was in the right place at the right time in multiple respects, but others were pretty damned close, and could have been there had Linux not existed.
> What if VMS had been subject to the same licensing quirk that UNIX was and was able to be produced by many vendors and eventually and Open Source version? Would we be using "Livax" today?
Well it was also one of the first portable OS's and being able to write programs in C vs. assembly for a particular architecture really helped it take off.
I'm not sure that "free" was a big deal when the machines themselves cost so much. A lot of OS software was "free" at the time, it was simply baked into the price of the machine.
> I'm not sure that "free" was a big deal when the machines themselves cost so much
It was for the hardware manufacturers who now didn't need to produce a whole new OS for their hardware. It also was for the universities who could play with the OS without astronomical OS licensing costs.
After that, the former could take advantage of so many of the latter coming out of school with UNIX experience.
Ah, but while that was definitely part of the success, the reason portability was even interesting, was because it was free ;)
You note yourself that the machines came "free" with their own software- Unix would have (at first) had a hard time competing with the bundled OS if it was not free. In which case it would not have spread beyond the PDP-11.
You might argue the machines are so expensive that "price is no object", but the major consumers of early Unix were (if memory serves) Universities.
I also occasionally wonder what has been lost to similar accidents of history. I know there are folks out there who considered UNIX inferior to VMS, for example. What if VMS had been subject to the same licensing quirk that UNIX was and was able to be produced by many vendors and eventually and Open Source version? Would we be using "Livax" today?