Standardizing Unconformity 9When 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