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Comment by kohala | Hacker News Reader

I like the headline for the issue from September 1992:

Is Unix Dead?

Soon Unix will face its most powerful adversary to date: Microsoft Windows NT. Will Unix Survive?

If AWS didn't use Linux for servers and Apple chose to buy BeOS instead of NeXT, would Unix be around as prominently as it is right now?

It certainly wouldn't be as prominent, and the ecosystem wouldn't be as rich. But it would still exist - the things that people like about it would still be there, and it had momentum before those things you mentioned.

Funny people credit AWS or Apple... Neither really convinced people unix was worth it in such a way that Sun Solaris did. Too bad they collapsed and oracle of all places snagged 'em.

You mean SunOS -- Solaris is quite new.

Solaris superseded SunOS in 1993 and let's be honest, Solaris 2.6 is when Sun "shined". most of us linux beards just see it as a linear progression until oracle murdered it.

Unix-type servers have always dominant as web servers and this alone made is so a substantial portion of CPUs in the world boot with such kernels even in the 90s I think.

With Unix-like-oses having some inherent advantages over Windows, and the successful open source model making Linux and BSD free and in constant development, in hindsight the extension of Unix-like-oses to more and more domains seems inevitable.

The only thing standing in the way of a Unix/Linux future really was the potential of microkernel OSes but over many years, these have failed to live up to their hype (GNU began development of HURD before Linux was announced).

I mean, Google using Linux internally and using it for the development of Android seem like more obvious breakout moments to me. But there many such moments says to me that no one of them mattered that much.

Before AWS, Apache running on Unix / Linux was the absolutely dominant web server, pretty much crushing Windows IIS. I don't think Apple factors in at all - they've barely budged the needle in terms of influencing this particular battle, IMHO.

You’re correct on Linux’s (and I would argue SunOS’s) dominance as a web server being the major factor, but Apple helped the popularize slick Unix workstations for developers, allowing us to live in Unix at a time when it was rarely possible to convince IT depts to support Linux on the desktop. This goes back to the eighties if you retroactively fold NeXT into the Apple lineage. Even though NeXTSTEP was never very popular in industry, it gained a substantial footprint in academia, and had an outsized impact on the internet. Berners-Lee even developed the web on a NeXTStation.

This early OS X ad shows how important continuing to serve and develop this market was for Apple:

http://www.mackungfu.org/dump/apple_unix_ad.jpg

AWS wouldn't be around now, since Linux servers dominated years before it launched.

Didn't BeOS ship bash and a partial POSIX interface? So we would still be in the "unix clone such as linux" land?

Yes, but BeOS was a lot less Unix-ish than Linux. Most of the details are fuzzy now, but there were a few big differences you could run into trying to port, notably around networking. (The never officially released BeOS 5.1 would have added a BSD-compatible networking environment, though.)

I think on the contrary, if AWS didn't use Linux it wouldn't have taken off. Everyone was on a linux stack back then with few exceptions. Microsoft had to spend millions in advertising to convince people they offered something other than windows.

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