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Comment by drekipus | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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 ...

No, I really mean UNIX monoculture.

The world is bigger than the desktop.

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