Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

If we had more OS diversity, tools wouldn't try to see UNIX everywhere.

I'm much less annoyed about "see[ing] UNIX everywhere" then I am about "there's a lot of specialised hardware design software that's only supported under Windows, so this isn't really avoidable".

I remember when we had more OS diversity. It was hell.

It was great, we don't need UNIX monoculture.

You mean a windows monoculture?

Unix stuff has only recently been "in the norm" for dev related workflows, it used to be entirely Windows only.

Same with office workflows, games (both playing and developing), graphics, etc.

Unix is the rebel here. It is bringing the diversity.

(Currently my workplace is probably 80% Mac, 19% Linux, 1% Windows, but I can see their point that it would be a lot easier to administrate if they were a monoculture of Mac).

No, I really mean UNIX monoculture.

The world is bigger than the desktop.

Yea, let's not forget the dark times of the late 1990s / early 2000s. It was next to impossible to motivate developers to release software for more than Windows. Windows application software developers were thoroughly steeped in the platform. WinMain(), HINSTANCE, LPTSTR, CopyMemory(). Even for parts of code that did not require interacting with Win32, they'd reach for DWORD instead of unsigned int. The effort of porting these monstrosities to something non-Windows was enormous. As a junior engineer, I'd butt heads with my senior leads, arguing to keep the business logic in portable C and keep the "windows stuff" minimal and in its own cordoned-off directory. All the senior guys thought this was ridiculous--we would never have to port this to anything but Windows. Their idea of "portable" software was: It works on Windows 95 and Windows NT.

You mean the times of Aix, Solaris, HP-UX, NeXT, Mac OS, Amiga OS, Atari ST, Acorn, BeOS,AS/400, z/OS, Psion, Palm Pilot, Atari Portolio, Newton, ...?

Aix, Atari, Amiga, Acorn, and BeOs were dead; Solaris, HP/UX, and NeXT were POSIX and had no applications except for highly specialised professional use cases; most of the rest were embedded platforms doing their own thing. None of them had any kind of meaningful market share. It was hell for Mac users because only the loyal developers from the previous decade remained. Windows was on something like 90% of home computers. I remember it very clearly, it was a Windows monoculture and it was fucking awful if you were on another platform.

I bet you still write M$....

Already your assessment regarding AIX being dead, when it is one of survivors from UNIX/Linux wars shows how your Microsoft hate blinds your judgement.

Do you know of a decent summary of the current state of AIX? I was aware that new systems were still being sold and deployed but had that filed more under "not dead yet" than "survivor" as such.

Well, no. Why would I? Even if I did, it does not change the facts.

AIX is alive-and-well in many enterprises. I know several companies in the gaming industry (casinos and lottery, not video games) that swear by AIX.

Same here. Still seeing some Solaris alive too.

Solaris was my favorite 90's Unix. I even had a Sparc 10 at home for a while!

Don't forget all the DEC stuff! OpenVMS, Ultrix, Digital Unix/Tru64 ...

The problem with OS diversity what that even UNIX wasn't a monoculture.

It was hell, but perhaps out of that hell was fashioned a sort of paradise.

If the framers of the Internet had not been faced with disparate systems all speaking different languages and protocols, if they had not been introduced to computing as a babel of vendors all wanting to do their own thing, then perhaps they would not have longed for vendor-neutral, interoperable protocols, such as we have today.

The drive in the 70s to hook up very different computing platforms and have them all talking to one another, that's what gave us the Internet today. Perhaps the choices in OS have diminished since the demise of proprietary systems and bespoke OS for so many platforms, but from where I sit, I still see a wide diversity of devices all connecting to the same Internet, all speaking the same protocol, and I'm thankful for that development.

That desire to "do their own thing" moved to infect application layer, and today I have to have multiple different video chat clients installed to talk to ensure I can meet with anyone.

I miss the 90's. There was much more diversity: VAX/VMS systems were quite common on the Internet. On the consumer side, I knew plenty of people with Amigas and Ataris at home. By the late 90's, that was all gone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com