Yes!! Someone with historical recollection!!
Linux is a good OS, the one I choose to use. BSD would have been just as
good, and probably better because of the licensing.
However, The person you are responding back too has a point. I am not
saying Microsoft "did" anything except make a dirty little secret
public.
Up to and including the 80286, the Intel based PC was a piece of crap.
Weak MMU, poor process management, poor protection, laughable virtual
memory. The 80386 was the turning point in the ISA machine empire.
A workstation is not a device, it is a system, both hardware and
software. What Microsoft did with NT was blur the distinction between
server and desktop. When NT was being dog and pony'd the average server
system as a text screen and the average desktop had a silly little GUI
(Windows/Mac/GEM). What Microsoft did is say, geez these 80386 machines
are powerfull enough to a lot more than we have been doing. (Something
we, no doubt, have been saying for a while) Had BSD been unencombered,
or SCO and Sun had reasonable pricing, Windows would not be where it is
today.
> >One of the ironies of the 'Linux vs. NT' debate is that NT itself made
> >the idea of Linux on the desktop possible. NT was the first product to
> >erase the difference in the minds of the consumer between 'personal
> >computer' and 'workstation', which in turn paved the way for press and
> >consumer consideration of the idea of using Linux as a desktop
> >operating system and not just as another flavor of Unix.
> Hmm. Let me understand this. A Compaq PC running Solaris/x86 or SCO or
> Xenix or BSD is a "workstation", while the same machine running Windows
> 3.1 is a "desktop PC". NT managed to erase this distinction. We'll ignore
> the fact that at one point the best Sun you could buy had the same CPU
> as an Amiga or Macintosh (25MHz 68030).
> If anything, I'd be more inclined that between Intel screwing up the 286
> and Microsoft dropping OS/2 to work on their own NT, they managed to
> delay erasing that line by a decade or more. By 1991, machines powerful
> enough to run Unix and as powerful as five-year-old "real workstations"
> became cheap enough that even poor Finish grad students could afford
> them. At that point, Microsoft still had four years of Windows 3.1
> ahead of it. Had AT&T not sued Berkley, the current "Linux attack"
> would have occurred four years ago and been the "BSD attack".
> Brian
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