[VIDEO] 1985 Review of UNIX. (Eerie!)

[Wibox]

http://www.archive.org/details/UNIX1985

It's interesting how similar things are to modern day.

It says UNIX is not user friendly, however via applications can be made to look and feel more similar to MS-DOS, which leads him to ask why not just use MS-DOS. They then go on to ask why are there so many distributions of UNIX (HP-UX, Xenix, AT&T UNIX, BSD, etc.)

They even interview someone from the "new" company Sun Microsystems who mentions open source software and how he doesn't predict UNIX will be popular in businesses but more so with engineers and tech folk.

[sordna]

Nice!!
Also, at 24:04 it says, performance aside, the most important factor when choosing a computer is the design of keyboard !  Timeless truths ...

[jnchin]

Is Sun still in business?

in the belly of oracle, yes

[Swede]

Got to love that back then the US military could be hacked by "Any mentaly unbalanced 16 year old"  

[jnchin]

Yeah but I guess the question are they just digested particles or did something ever happen with that?

Sun made/updated java, and I know that oracle is trying really hard to do new java updates and such...  They even broke eclipse once (what is referred to as an ide)

Also oracle is trying to sue google for using java in its android platform

Not sure if that really answers your question though

[sordna]

I'm wondering about the future of the Sun/SPARC hardware and their UNIX stuff. They did pretty cool stuff like 16-core processors, the ZFS filesystem, etc.

[DaemonRaccoon]

Even in 1985, Microsoft was ingrained in the computing vocabulary. Also LOL terminals, today we call them thin clients.

[Wibox]

Nice business model.

Sue people for technology you stole from someone else.

When so many bogus patents exist for IP (imaginary property) these huge companies receive, and give, tons of lawsuits and legal threats every day. It's just that sometimes they make the headlines. It's all part of the business and keeping eachother in check.

Sun is mostly dead. They are technically a subsidiary of Oracle and are still keeping their projects there, like MySQL. I don't really know what's going to happen to that since Oracle has their own commercial DB. As far as their UNIX stuff, most of it is dead. They contributed a little but in the end Solaris is a joke (more like slowlaris amirite?)

SolarOS, on the other hand, now there's an operating system

[Ekaros]

Unix... I think I sometimes even use it...

Still, software patents, I don't wanna even say anything...

[quadibloc]

I tried to figure out what use Sun was to ORACLE. After all, they were mostly famous for Java and Open Office, which were being given away. And Solaris was a "real UNIX", but how valuable is that when Linux is being given away?

My conclusion was that Oracle, in competing head-on with IBM and its DB/2 database product, felt it needed to level the playing field by being a hardware company instead of a software company. At the time, SPARC processors from Sun had RAS features, just as IBM mainframes do, and just as Itanium chips from Intel did... but which were conspicuously absent from the x86 platform.

So, given that the future of the Itanium was doubtful, instead of simply making Oracle-branded Itanium boxes, Oracle decided that buying Sun was the simplest way to get a stable supply, because they would control it, of processors with RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability - in the IBM version of the acronym; Sun has the S stand for Scaleability instead).

Shortly after, Intel came out with the Nehalem-EX, bringing RAS to the x86 platform. Oops.

Even with Intel's premium pricing on Xeons, Oracle would be hard pressed to match the price/performance of Intel chips, and so the value of the Sun acquisition to it seems to have largely evaporated when that happened.

[keyboardlover]

Gaining control of Java was important to them so they can offer a "full suite" of java development tools that can compete better with IBM Websphere and open source tools. (Akin to Microsoft's .net tools). More control over the language should give them that.

[TacticalCoder]

Super cool video, thanks for the link!

It's interesting how similar things are to modern day.

It says UNIX is not user friendly

Well that has changed for sure: OS X is Unix (it's a Mach/BSD hybrid kernel) and so are the majority of smartphones (iPhones are iOS, which is also BSD Unix and Android phones are Linux, which is Unix (*) too and these two represent more than 50% of the smartphones out there).

So I'm not sure I would say that Unix is not "user friendly" nowadays : my technologically-not-so-inclined girlfriend is using her MacBook daily and so is my mom : )

Unix is just a family of OSes providing security, scalability and efficiency: it's what you then slap on top of it that makes it user-friendly or not.  There are 55 millions+ users of personal computers running OS X, that's pretty user-friendly in my book (and surely enough if you open an OS X "terminal" you've got access to all the Unix command-line niceties and one can "root" his iPhone and go in its BSD Unix subsystem if wanted).

So things are similar in that the 42-years old (?) Unix concept is still rocking but it's also different in that now a huge number of technological non-savvy people are running Unix daily on their personal computer and carrying a Unix OS in their pocket.

Granted, the first Linux I installed, back in the 20th century (Slackware), wasn't user-friendly and my Debian GNU/Linux workstation ain't exactly for noobs ))