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Elite Member
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Joined: 21-Aug-2003
Posts: 2896
From: Trondheim, Norway | | |
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| @matthey
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matthey wrote:
kolla Quote:
Eh, what? What "hacked" Linux are you yapping about?
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The original Linux had many x86(-64) dependencies and semantics. Linus believed that Linux was inherently Intel specific. The 68k version of Linux for the Amiga was one of the first ports and it was 2-3 years after Linux was released before others succeeded in porting the architecture specific hack job with many changes. Unix and then Linux evolved which required many years and changes. |
What does all this have to do with the actual statement that I commented:
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It (unix) was low performance and was going nowhere on the desktop until a highly optimized and hacked Linux version was created for the large x86-64 platform.
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"going nowhere"? It was going A LOT of places, more like... everywhere!
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kollaQuote:
NeXTStep? IRIX? I recall even Ultrix with X11R4 and CDE using a puck mouse being a heck lot better desktop than contemporary windows and mac. And Linux isn't Unix.
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Are niche market Unix derivatives requiring high performance hardware and using vendor specific devices comparable to personal computers? |
Who said "personal computers" was a requirement?
And to the point - yes, why not? Most people wanted a PC to run their familiar apps, but those of us who had no issues with Unix, getting "high performance" hardware with vendor specific devices (as if that was not an issue on PC and Mac?!) to run "niche market Unix derivatives" was not much of a problem. We got them cheap second hand.
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| Are they really examples of broadly popular Unix derived success? |
Yes, they were, very much so. But I understand now that your definition of "success" is solely about "home computers" - not all vendors have "home users" as their target market - it is perfectly fine to have "the movie industry" or "academia" or "banking" or whatever as target market and have success, without even touching "home market".
Unix and later Linux has had so many successes in so many different markets and segments, it's almost easier to count which market it has not had success in.
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| NeXTStep did eventually evolve into the new MacOS after personal computer hardware became powerful enough so it is one example of success but after a long evolution of changes from Unix to BSD to NeXTStep to Darwin to MacOS and evolving over 30+ years. |
NeXTStep runs quite well on a 68040 based old NeXTStation. It was a success, never meant as a "home computer", but more targeted at academia and research.
And the evolution is Unix to BSD to NeXTStep (first 68k, then sparc, pa-risc and x86) to Rhapsody (x86 and at last PPC) to (Mac)OSX (and Darwin - x86, ppc, amd64 and ppc64) to macOS 11 and 12 (currect, still with Darwin, currently release 21.2.0, amd64, arm64)
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Minix and Linux were some of the earliest derivatives of Unix which tried to simplify, optimize and improve the efficiency to better run on personal computers. |
With minix to a point of being close to utterly useless - it took decades for it to become "usable", and then only certain embedded targets. And then it ruined its entire legacy by becoming most known for being "the security problem" for a whole range of Intel products that used Minix for lights-out management. Success.
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| Windows and the original MacOS had adequate GUIs which ran on lower end personal computer hardware than Unix derivatives ran on at that time. |
Heh, macOS perhaps, but Windows? Adequate? As I said, in the mid/late 90s I found it a LOT more adequate to get an old workstation second hand to run that niche Unix, like an second hand Solaris or SGI.
Oh, and have you ever used Apple/UX?
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| The AmigaOS had the most responsive GUI, the best multitasking and the smallest footprint which none could match. |
I don't know about "best multitasking", and all the benefits came with a huge obstacle that made the OS model very much irrelevant for just about all market segments as time went on. Total and utter lack of any security measures (memory protection), and no adequate networking stack - ALWAYS more and more years behind.
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kolla Quote:
Hm, in old time Unixen was not much open source - the word "open" at the time had a different meaning - "code open to our licenced partners" and to some degree "open standards". Open Source as we know it today came with GNU and GPL, really. BSD was (and is) open for commercial exploitation.
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I understand but Unix APIs and standards still evolved for years before being copied. The open source code Unix derived branches evolved quicker and later. |
Sure, and it's not like open source Unix and closed source Unix didn't evolve together, they are very much interweaved and entangled with each other. Today, most Unixen (and for that matter, Windows too) are a mix of closed and open source components, blended together as far as licenses allow.
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kolla Quote:
He cared enough to keep PPC alive for a decade, he could have dropped it right away when he took over Apple, but instead they spent years porting NeXTStep (with a mac aqua skin and cocoa) to PPC. |
The Apple PPC Mac years were from 1994 to 2006 and Apple nearly went bankrupt in 1997. Not exactly the best years for Apple and Macintosh sales. |
I don't quite see the relevance of this argument. The point I made was that Apple remained committed to PowerPC also after Jobs took over - they COULD have switched to x86 right away, as NeXTSTEP was already running on x86. But they didn't, because Jobs knew that key to success was to, at very least, keep their existing customer base, who had just been transitioning from 68k to PowerPC. To switch again to x86 right away would have killed all credibility, and besides... with NeXTSTEP and OpenSTEP, Jobs had a portable code base, porting to PowerPC shouldn't be so hard, right? And then it was the need to bring over a bit of the looks and feel from MacOS, so that the user base would recognise the OS as "mac". This whole effort took place on both x86 and PowerPC systems under the name "Rhapsody", which once it was finished (enough), was released as MacOSX. I was at univ at the time, and there were quite a few Rhapsody systems in the student lab.
And then there was mkLinux, a little bit on the side of it all.
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PPC was as good for Apple as it has been for the Amiga. The 68k Mac was relatively more successful in personal computer sales than the x86(-64) Mac which was more successful than the PPC Mac.
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So "success" in your view boils down to just sales numbers._________________
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