>>I wanted Coherent SOOOO bad but simply couldn't justify $500 for it when
Dos was free$.
At first, AT&T didn't think there was any money to be made in the OS
business, and allowed source code to be used an Universities IT courses.
UNIX was the only OS source any of us had ever seen, so it's design concepts
became the foundation of all of today's modern operating systems. But once
money started rolling in from UNIX, AT&T got greedy. Gates simply priced
DOS right and took the market. OEM versions of XP can be had for less than
$100, and that's pretty smart. Only NT (basis for w2k and xp) and Linux
have been able to grow in market share.
It will be interesting to see how Red Hat does with their attempt to move
Linux up to UNIX prices. Novell/SuSE will be interesting. It's good that
they are moving Linux up-market, but I believe its important to keep free
Linux alive. History clearly shows that UNIX grew at the expense of
mainframe systems, but the NT-family took it from UNIX and Netware. I
believe Linux is growing at the expense of both. But when UNIX started
growing fast, the major companies (HP, DEC, IBM, Sun, etc.) fought over
standards and forked (branched) the code. Moving between SunOS and HP-UX
was annoying. Just like Gnome/KDE. I hope this doesn't turn into another
code war.
I wish Apple would port their OS to AMD 64 and add .net extensions. That
would really change the game. Would any of you guys buy an AMD64 OS/X for
$500?
Ken Elliott
=====================
-----Original Message-----
From: slug@nks.net [mailto:slug@nks.net] On Behalf Of Bill Canaday
Sent: Friday, May 07, 2004 10:24 PM
To: slug@nks.net
Subject: Re: [SLUG] Re: Linspire aka Lindows now trying to make Apple Mad?
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On Friday 07 May 2004 09:55 pm, you wrote:
> Xenix was selling for $595/seat mail-order. Coherent (a UNIX clone)
> was $500. A Lattice C compiler was $350. A 40 MB HDD was $3,495, and
> a 368 MB hard disk was $$17,995. You usually spent $5,000 to $15,000
> for a well-equipped machine in those days. We all have it so good today.
>
> (Hi, I'm Ken and I'm a pack rat...)
>
> Ken Elliott
Excellent archives, Ken! I wanted Coherent SOOOO bad but simply couldn't
justify $500 for it when Dos was free$.
I finally got a copy of Coherent a few years ago. Free as part of a Unix
sysadmin class at the local Comm. College. Unfortunately, the Mark Williams
Company is no more so it wasn't possible to update it.
If an unsupported version of Coherent had been available for ~$50, I'd have
bought a copy and quite likely so would a number of other people I knew at
the time. We were thinking that dos was 'ok', but Unix was the next step up.
But none of us could justify $500 just for an OS / no apps.
Kind of like Win XP today.
Bill
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