I can't get over the idea that this is a bunch of people who were angry their favorite proprietary systems got killed by open systems and, ultimately, open source. Compatibility and not being dependent on a single company are good things!
[1] In college, early 90s---I got to use IRIX on a machine that cost $30,000 in 1991. PCs caught up and past it pretty much by the mid-late 90s. Also, I did some consulting work at a bank which used SCO. They paid God knows how much for every conceivable package available for SCO. The base system? Pretty much just a shell and some commands in `/bin`. Compiler? Pay. Network? Pay. TCP/IP for said network? Pay.
Vladimir Barmin had a very hilarious writeup about getting SCO to work at all (http://lib.ru/UNIXOID/scomastdie.txt, in Russian).
Edit: links -dump works great piped to translate-shell -no-autorrect -b and less -SR ...
links -dump http://lib.ru/UNIXOID/scomastdie.txt | trans -b -no-auto -t en 2> err > crap2.txt> It was printed in 1994. Linux and BSD (either FreeBSD or 386BSD, I can't recall which) where around, but Open Source (TM) as we now know it wasn't.
I think the "open systems" phrase is more important than the "open source" phrase in the GP's comment.
In 1994, Unix systems, even though proprietary, were still more open than the competing systems. Sure, it'll be another 5 years or so before the writing was on the wall for all non-FLOSS systems, but in 1994 it was both a) easier and cheaper to get your hands on a Unix system, and b) easier and cheaper to program it.
Sure, they weren't open-source, but they were a hell of a lot more open to hacking than the (for example) Lisp systems, or VMS, etc.
Aren't they even more open than the previous Unix systems used to be?
Sorry to nitpick but I've seen this grammatical error in comments here three times just this morning and it begins to grate.
Could the reason that idea is so hard to get over be because it's just wrong?
I don't think these people "hated" UNIX because it was "open," I think they hated it because they thought it was bad.
Proper hacker projects died a few years ago with the end of the PDP10/ITS/Emacs and the GNU project was still working on a replacement for that platform but cloning Unix with Emacs/Info and so on top of that because of convenience with 'modern' times.
I think that they were angry that the inferior product was winning/had won. The "worse is better" essay didn't come out until a decade later, IIRC.
To be clear, the Unix systems were worse in all the ways they point out, but better in the way that mattered - multiple companies provided Unix, and the skills from one Unix to another were easily transferable.
The "winning" system won not because it was superior, but because it was easier to hire for. Need an operator for your SCO Unix? Someone experienced with Sun boxes could onboard faster than someone experienced with VMS.
NeWS also could and did run on some other Unixes.
So really a lot of the history has to do with complex pissing context between different vendors that eventually escalated into full blown Unix wars.
What am I missing?
Company owned Unices still dominated the landscape in 1994