Interview with Lennart Poettering (LinuxFR.org) [LWN.net]

Interview with Lennart Poettering (LinuxFR.org)

Posted Jul 6, 2011 18:50 UTC (Wed) by trasz (guest, #45786)
In reply to: Interview with Lennart Poettering (LinuxFR.org) by tialaramex
Parent article: Interview with Lennart Poettering (LinuxFR.org)

Note that most of the commercial UNIX systems went away because they were bound to the hardware architectures that went away.

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Interview with Lennart Poettering (LinuxFR.org)

Posted Jul 6, 2011 19:12 UTC (Wed) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]

Exactly. The reason Linux and Windows did so well was because they ran on $5,000 server quality PCs, whereas IIRC SunOS ran on a $20,000 workstation, and AIX on a $60,000 workstation. The takeover of Linux and windows was more because of the ability to run on cheaper hardware than being a better OS.

I contracted at IBM Federal Systems when it was sold to Loral, and the first thing we did was dump the AIX systems for Sun, because of the price. Not because Sun was better than AIX. I personally thought AIX was better than Sun, but not worth that much of a price difference.

Interview with Lennart Poettering (LinuxFR.org)

Posted Jul 6, 2011 19:54 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

There were lots of "PC Unix" OS products out there, with hardware requirements pretty close to those of decent Linux servers.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt

Most of them sank without a splash pretty quickly once you could get stable, supported Linux.

Interview with Lennart Poettering (LinuxFR.org)

Posted Jul 7, 2011 5:02 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

One of those was even called Solaris. :)

Interview with Lennart Poettering (LinuxFR.org)

Posted Jul 7, 2011 11:52 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]

I remember them trying out SCO's PC Unix, but it had lots of issues, and could not handle what was needed. Eventually, they switched most of the Unix boxes over to Windows (not Linux).