The Land Before Linux: Let’s talk about the Unix desktops!
Today, thanks to Android and ChromeOS, Linux is an important end-user operating system. But, before Linux, there were important Unix desktops, although most of them never made it.
Way back in 1993, I oversaw a PC Magazine feature review on Unix desktops. Yes, that’s right, before I was a Linux desktop user, I was a Unix user. Indeed, I’ve been a Unix fan since 1979, when 2BSD Unix arrived on the scene. But by 1993, numerous Unix desktops had appeared, and I talked the magazine into letting me kick their tires.
My team and I reviewed Unix distros from Consensys, Dell, Interactive Unix, SCO, Univel, Sun, and NeXT. We also looked at but didn’t review Unixes from UHC, Microport, and other companies. I guarantee many of you have ever heard of them.
What about Linux? Yes, it was around, and I was already using it. But the state-of-the-art Linux distro was Softlanding Linux System (SLS), and I couldn’t convince my editors – or myself, for that matter – that it was reviewable. The first version that I would have reviewed, Slackware, which is still with us today – was still months in the future.
Today, only Dell is still with us, and it’s not certainly in business now because of its System V Release 4 (SVR4) Unix release. However, one of those early Unix desktops is still alive, well, and running in about one in four desktops.
That operating system, of course, is macOS X, the direct descendent of NeXT’s NeXTSTEP. You could argue that macOS, based on the multi-threaded, multi-processing microkernel operating system Mach, BSD Unix, and the open source Darwin, is the most successful of all Unix operating systems.
It sure didn’t look that way at the time. It wasn’t that Windows was better than Unix. In 1993, Unix’s competition, if you can call it that, was Windows 3.1 and NT 3.1.
NT, in particular, at that point, was a bad joke of a server operating system. NT only started to matter with the Windows NT 3.5 release.
There are many reasons Windows beat Unix.
