Blogging Ottinger (tim)1985 Computer Chronicles
My friend Brandon (Boris) sent me a link to a Computer Chronicles episode from 1985 that asked a crazy question. The question is “will Unix become the next MS-DOS?”
They suggested that Unix might become the operating system of the future. That future, of course, is now. We are finding Unix-like programs (BSD, Linux, AIX, Mac OS X, etc) on desktops all over the country and all over the world. How many? Nobody can tell. It’s notoriously hard to count copies of free software. In addition, we’re finding Linux on IBM mainframes, Point-of-sale systems everywhere from McDonald’s to Burlington Coat Factory and AutoZone, and on mobile phones and media players. Most of our routers and cable modems are running some kind of Linux, and perhaps we are interacting with some kind of Unix many times per day. Of course, the phone switching systems have been based on one kind of Unix or another for a very long time. You probably interact with some kind of Unix system several times a day, and at least a few dozen times a week.
They listed the portability of Linux as a major feature. They’re right. Being able to play on desktops is a good thing (and Linux certainly does), but also being able to run headless (no GUI) on servers is a very powerful feature. If it can be moved across chips and architectures then it can be put on devices where people don’t even know there is a computer, let alone an operating system. This is true for the telephone switching system and various consumer electronics.
In the 1985 episode, they didn’t talk much about the X Window System, so they couldn’t know about KDE, Gnome, XFCE, or Enlightenment. They didn’t know how far we could come in 20 years, and who can blame them. They did hypothesize about a Mac look-alike interface on top of Unix, never dreaming that Mac would eventually be a form of unix!
It’s funny now that the main reason Bill Joy gave for Unix not to spread is that it lacked a program like Lotus 1-2-3. Of course, now the remaining barriers seem to be 1) it’s not preloaded, and 2) there are cool Windows games. As virtualization and marketing continue, we will see these things eroding, and indeed they may not be that important anyway. Everything I need to do I can do in Linux. My family is converted to Non-MS and has been for some time, and the only complaints I hear is that we can’t play City of Heroes (yet). I will learn about emulators and the like, and I bet we’ll be doing that before too long.
As the last word, they have a fellow telling how Unix portability is a myth (not so now) how incompatible the versions are (heh) and how user-hostile the system is. Hmmm… I think those arguments are pretty much dead now, though the odd microschill might try to dredge it up now and then.
It’s a fun video. You should give it a play, and remember they’re talking about Unix 20 years ago, before Linux popularized it in the public eye.
