Ads and articles from UnixWorld Magazine (1992-1996) | Hacker News Reader

Ads and articles from UnixWorld Magazine (1992-1996)

sunhelp.org

76 pointsjjuliano21 comments

The first picture I clicked into (http://www.sunhelp.org/unixworld/coherent.jpg) is an ad for Coherent Unix, which was a commercial Unix clone sold in the '80s and '90s, by Mark Williams Company in Northbrook, IL.

I look them up to see what they're up to and, of course, they are no longer in operation. Interestingly enough, it was owned by a man named Robert Swartz, who just happened to be the father of one Aaron Swartz. What coincidence.

(Wikipedia page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Williams_Company)

I've got images of Coherent install media and a PDF of the (really awesome) manual. It was a great "UNIX" for people who couldn't afford a real AT&T distribution, before Linux came on the scene.

Wow, I never knew that, small world. I have very fond memories of Coherent. I split the license cost (a whopping $99 bucks) with a buddy, both of us making near-minimum wage as bench techs for a used computer shop in Atlanta (which, much to my shock is still in business today). A few months later I scraped together enough money to pick up a used Sun 3/60 running Sun OS (and shortly after that, moved to an early version of Slackware), but Coherent will always be my first Unix.

Hi, Bill here, owner of sunhelp.org. My own site is the last thing I expected to see on HN this morning. :)

(... and I just put up a nicer index page for this content)

The article ('Steve-Jobs-UW041993.pdf') on Next's move to software-only is really interesting.

It is. Personally, I think the analysts were wrong and Next should have continued with the Cube and the Station. They just should have cut down on profit margins slightly to accumulate more sales, and then return the margins to normal after the device became popular.

The iMac is so popular now, and it's a closed system as well. Granted, the world is quite different now than it was in 1995, but they could have pulled it off.

I'm using GNUstep on my Linux box, and the software behind Next was 20, perhaps 30 years ahead of its time. If you compare it to OS X, you'll see that barely anything has changed besides a few graphical updates and a few nifty utilities such as Notification Center and Spotlight.

It was a great system. But keeping the hardware and software integrated might have allowed the company to keep its true vision intact. They only needed to cut back on the style a bit.

> keeping the hardware and software integrated might have allowed the company to keep its true vision intact

They did, but not under the NeXT brand. It's under the Apple brand now.

A sentiment that several Apple employees have voiced is:

NeXT acquired Apple for negative -$400M

That says it all, I think. Apple today is more like a successful NeXT than it is like Apple of the 90s.

I don't think I share your sentiment. Apple has always been a consumer-oriented company, whereas NeXT was oriented towards business, educational, and professional use.

Apple is still a consumer electronics company, not a professional one. Whatever pro products they used to sell are now obsolete and they don't seem keen on updating them. The only thing that Apple computers share with NeXT machines is the operating system.

The MacBook Pro line is still quite popular with professionals, especially developers. With the retina display on the 15inch, it appears to be the best option for a professional laptop available.

Is this different from the kinds of 'pro products' you are referring to?

Well, really, a professional desktop is what they're missing, and features in OS X that may have been asking for, such as the latest version of OpenGL, ZFS or a suitable replacement, and better virtual desktop/window management that was crippled with 10.7.

It seems as if all "improvements" to OS X are for consumers and "power users," such as Notification Center, Mission Control, porting of iOS apps over to the desktop, etc. There's been no major breakthrough since FileVault 2 was announced, and usability has drastically dropped since 10.6 in favor of kitsch like the stitched iOS apps.

“The only thing that Apple computers share with NeXT machines is the operating system.”

Which is the main reason why people buy a Mac, so yeah, that’s pretty major. Also inherited from the NeXT platform: Objective-C, Cocoa, Xcode, Keynote, WebObjects, and the plan to switch to the x86 architecture.

However, what was meant with the quote was that the NeXT folks invaded Apple and took the most influential positions, Steve Jobs of course being the prime example. When Steve Jobs took over at Apple, he got rid of the entire Board of Directors, lots of VPs and other upper management. Some people were promoted from within Apple, but many of the positions were filled by former NeXT employees.

It seems odd to think that a successful NeXT would have somehow behaved differently than the successful Apple, considering that the same man would have been driving either one.

A harbinger:

"Steve wanted a complete systems compoany," says one high-level executive who left the company. "He always wanted to re-create Apple."

Apple should have kept A/UX back in the day, instead of dumping it.

I only managed to see one system live at an exhibition back in 1994.

Has anyone used it back then?

I bought one of Apple's first webservers, which used A/UX. It wasn't a really great Unix compared to some others available at the time.

It was terrible. Slow, crashy, difficult to port to.

The SGI Indy one is worth looking at if only for the O'Reilly media ad on the second page. Some things change, some stay the same.

The SGI Indy was the first Unix system I lusted after. They ran a magazine ad showing off the back, with the tagline "Any Port in a Storm".

Not too many computing experiences were more pleasurable than the first time I walked into an MIT computer lab as an incoming freshman and found myself face-to-face with an Indy: Video camera, Jurassic Park file browser and all.

OMG, I still have my coherent 3,5"s somewhere... loved it on my superbeefy 386sx

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