The mass extinction of Unix workstations | Hacker News Reader

The mass extinction of Unix workstations

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The author doesn't mention macOS much but I think it deserves some credit of being the last high volume unix workstation around.

I think it's difficult to give full credit to macOS as being a true Unix workstation. It is more like a desktop operating system built over Unix since the desktop environment and utilities are not as well integrated into the underlying Unix environment.

That is its NeXTSTEP roots showing up.

Steve Jobs was always quite open about his opinion on UNIX, and there are a couple of vintage videos where this comes up.

NeXTSTEP compatibility with UNIX wasn't much different from Microsoft goals in supporting POSIX on NT (initially), only to enter the market and ensure existing UNIX stuff could be ported into NeXTSTEP.

OS X followed the same idea.

> I think it's difficult to give full credit to macOS as being a true Unix workstation.

The FoxTrot comic strip referenced Mac OS X's "Unix underpinnings" back in 2002:

* https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2002/02/25

See also Tim O'Reilly (of tech book fame):

> O’Reilly suggested through his own anecdotal evidence that switching from other platforms to Mac OS X is a strong trend particularly for what he calls “alpha geeks” — people who are key decision-makers or influencers on technology development and policy. Many of these “alpha geeks” appear to be trading in Wintel iron with Linux installed on it for Mac OS X instead. And while many of them appear to be continuing to depend on Windows for work, they’re using Mac OS X on their own time or for special projects they would have used Linux boxes for, not too far in the past.

* https://www.macworld.com/article/155519/oreilly-7.html

It's been a 'selling point' for over twenty years now.

Tough to make that case from the same historical perspective and era the author has used. In today's environment, sure, Apple's OS can be a Unix-like workstation, but back in the day...

In my own experience, rarely was a Macintosh even considered for Unix workstation replacement, although in the early OS X era we once brought in a brand new G3 purely for testing of portability but it was not a success for our needs so it was eventually used only for light office-related workloads. We never got around to trying a NeXT workstation.

EDITED to add: IMHO only a lot of setup work i.e. Homebrew can make a modern macOS machine comparable to a classic Unix-like workstation for traditional UNIX capabilities.

Unix workstations might be extinct, but Linux systems are the birds to the workstation’s dinosaurs. The software environment pretty much continued as is

A raspberry pi running linux might even be faster than some of these old workstations, with better graphics to boot.

This is true, you could even run Windows 10 Pro for ARM on it if you're willing to put yourself through the grinder.

Than some. Will be nice to see some benchmarks. R-Pi 1 was not exactly flying. (R-Pi 4 is out of stock)

Due to the environments and tools being so similar, the pool of real world system administrator and end user knowledge did not have to be created from scratch. Unix User Groups soon gave way to Linux User Groups (often almost the same cadre of folks). This was essential to such a rapid transition from Unix workstations to Linux.

Ah, yes. The good old SPARC 'pizza box' that accompanied the 70-pound NEC 19-inch monitor, and the mirrored mouse-pad. Them's was the days.

I too was a Solaris 2 fan, with SunOS (retrospectively renamed as Solaris 1) before that.

For several years I was running both Solaris on SPARC and Solaris on x86 on the same bench.

Then in 2001, Linux killed both of those.

EDIT: On a whim, I looked in my archive directories for 'solaris', etc and came across the following:

    /a/comp/iso/solaris-2.6-x86.iso
    /a/boot_images/sol_2.6_x86_boot
    /a/comp/iso/solaris7_x86.iso
    /a/comp/iso/solaris_8_x86_boot144.img
    /a/comp/iso/solaris_8_x86_dev.conf.asst.img
    /a/comp/iso/solaris_8_x86_1of2.iso
    /a/comp/iso/solaris_8_x86_2of2.iso
    /a/comp/iso/solaris_8_x86_documentation.iso
    /a/comp/iso/solaris_8_x86_languages.iso
    /a/comp/iso/solaris_companion_software.iso
    /a/comp/iso/solaris_star_office_52.iso

Star Office! Fun times!

The decline of Unix workstations hit me right in the gut. I went into college with dreams of working on operating systems for one of the big Unix vendors like Sun or SGI. Linux started hitting big in the middle of my freshman year and those companies started to decline. Fortunately, I was also into this new thing called "the web" and I was able to pivot my career aspirations toward that.

We all need to say "Thank you" to Intel and to the stupidity of HP (HP-PA, DEC Alpha) and SGI.

I went to Purdue, which was on the leading edge of Unix mini's. (PUCC built the first multiprocessor machine.) Imagine my disappointment when I took my new wife back to the old computer lab where I wrote my stuff, and seeing all the terminals replaced with Windows NT machines. I couldn't fault them though.

In the 90's, I did some FEA, and wound up getting asked to be a formal sysadmin for all the Unix workstations doing this kind of work in the company. I cleaned up our sprawling mess by installing a central server, making a NIS workgroup, and hosting home directories, and versioned folders for binaries. In the process, I wound up dealing with all of these machines. I have a fondness for all the OS's, for different reasons. I found HP-UX to be the least intrusive, IRIX to be the prettiest, Solaris to be the most well-supported (with the shareware site I forget the name of), and AIX to be the most sysop friendly (with their TUI admin tool that would explain the commands it was running). I've looked at buying old machines on Ebay, but apparently a lot of other people are waxing nostalgic about them too, and the prices reflect this.

Thankfully these days there's emulation to help soften the blow - it's not the same as the physical workstation, but at least it's easier on the wallet.

As for the shareware site, was it perhaps Sunsite or Metalab?

Sunsite! Yes! That was it!

I worked in several mixed-Unix shops, and juggling all the GUI/TUI sysadmin tools (SAM, SMIT, Solstice, etc.) and desktop environments was actually fun in a challenging way. Inspired shell scripting, NFS, NIS, and eventually CDE helped keep the flock somewhat in harmony. It was a zoo, but a manageable one as long as the limitations of each flavour were taken into account.

In the 90's I worked at some pretty large heterogeneous Unix shops. We had Solaris, HP-UX, DEC Unix, IRIX, and some others. It was a sprawling mess of NFS mounts and NIS authentication ("ypcat passwd", anyone?) I agree with most of what you said, though I preferred Solaris. IRIX on the desktop was pretty fun though! My next job was a pretty big AIX shop. AIX "felt weird", unless you used "smit", which was the TUI you're probably referring to.

In my retro Unix collection, I have a Sparc, Alpha, IRIX, and NeXT box, but they're not all in working order.

> Over the years, I’ve owned exactly one of these machines – a Sun Ultra 5 running Solaris 9 – and I remember enjoying that little machine greatly.

My work machine from late 1998 to 2001 was a Sun Ultra 10 which was basically the same machine as the Ultra 5 except with more memory, support for an additional HD and some faster processors. Both were part of their low cost line. PCI slots, ATI graphics and IDE drives. I hated that machine. It was still much more expensive than x86 machines while being significantly out-performed by them. The day it was removed from my desk was one of joy.

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