Standardizing Unconformity 9 When the Motorola 68000 microprocessor appeared, dozens of workstation companies sprouted. Very few had significant O/S expertise. Virtually all of them used Unix, because it was portable, and because Unix hackers that had no other way to get their fixes were readily and cheaply available. These programmers were capable of jury-rigging (sometimes called “port- ing”) Unix onto different platforms. For these workstation manufacturers, the economic choice was Unix. Did users want the operating system where bugs didn’t get fixed? Not likely. Did users want the operating system with a terrible tool set? Proba- bly not. Did users want the OS without automatic command completion? No. Did users really want the OS with a terrible and dangerous user inter- face? No way. Did users want the OS without memory mapped files? No. Did users want the OS that couldn’t stay up more than a few days (some- times hours) at a time? Nope. Did users want the only OS without intelli- gent typeahead? Indeed not. Did users want the cheapest workstation money could buy that supported a compiler and linker? Absolutely. They were willing to make a few sacrifices. Users said that they wanted Unix because it was better than the “stone knives and bear skins” FORTRAN and Cobol development environments that they had been using for three decades. But in chosing Unix, they unknowingly ignored years of research on operating systems that would have done a far better job of solving their problems. It didn’t really matter, they thought: Unix was better than what they had. By 1984, according to DEC’s own figures, one quarter of the VAX installations in the United States were running Unix, even though DEC wouldn’t support it. Sun Microsystems became the success it is today because it produced the cheapest workstations, not because they were the best or provided the best price/performance. High-quality OSs required too much computing power to support. So the economical, not technical, choice was Unix. Unix was written into Sun's business plan, accomplished Unix hackers were among the founders, and customers got what they paid for. Standardizing Unconformity “The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.” —Grace Murray Hopper

10 Unix Ever since Unix got popular in the 1980s, there has been an ongoing effort on the part of the Unix vendors to “standardize” the operating system. Although it often seems that this effort plays itself out in press releases and not on programmers’ screens, Unix giants like Sun, IBM, HP, and DEC have in fact thrown millions of dollars at the problem—a problem largely of their own making. Why Unix Vendors Really Don’t Want a Standard Unix The push for a unified Unix has come largely from customers who see the plethora of Unixes, find it all too complicated, and end up buying a PC clone and running Microsoft Windows. Sure, customers would rather buy a similarly priced workstation and run a “real” operating system (which they have been deluded into believing means Unix), but there is always the risk that the critical applications the customer needs won’t be supported on the particular flavor of Unix that the customer has purchased. The second reason that customers want compatible versions of Unix is that they mistakenly believe that software compatibility will force hardware vendors to compete on price and performance, eventually resulting in lower workstation prices. Of course, both of these reasons are the very same reasons that workstation companies like Sun, IBM, HP, and DEC really don’t want a unified version of Unix. If every Sun, IBM, HP, and DEC workstation runs the same soft- ware, then a company that has already made a $3 million commitment to Sun would have no reason to stay with Sun’s product line: that mythical company could just as well go out and purchase a block of HP or DEC workstations if one of those companies should offer a better price. It’s all kind of ironic. One of the reasons that these customers turn to Unix is the promise of “open systems” that they can use to replace their propri- etary mainframes and minis. Yet, in the final analysis, switching to Unix has simply meant moving to a new proprietary system—a system that hap- pens to be a proprietary version of Unix. Date: Wed, 20 Nov 91 09:37:23 PST From: simsong@nextworld.com To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: Unix names Perhaps keeping track of the different names for various versions of Unix is not a problem for most people, but today the copy editor here