As an outsider at the time, when Linux was taking off, there seemed to be a lot of people asking why they wouldn't Open Source Solaris.
It seemed to me like they couldn't decide whether they were a hardware company or a software company.
Mind you, I was young at the time so possibly didn't have the best understanding of the situation. Seems like they left the decision too late though.
Dismissing Linux as a hobbiest OS definitely turned out badly.
>Dismissing Linux as a hobbiest OS definitely turned out badly.
That actually made me laugh. Not because it's untrue, but because it reminded me of this:
One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How
enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
Unix was written on our machines and for our machines
many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on
our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX
use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy
to get started with. It’s great for students, great for
somewhat casual users, and it’s great for interchanging
programs between different machines. And so, because of
its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have
good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
It is our belief, however, that serious professional
users will run out of things they can do with UNIX.
They’ll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when
they get to be serious about programming.
With UNIX, if you’re looking for something, you can
easily and quickly check that small manual and find out
that it’s not there. With VMS, no matter what you look
for — it’s literally a five-foot shelf of documentation —
if you look long enough it’s there. That’s the difference
— the beauty of UNIX is it’s simple; and the beauty of
VMS is that it’s all there.
— Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984
Because history[0][1][2][3]. The timelines (and license, in the case of VMS/OpenVMS -- even to this day) didn't make it inevitable, but certainly paved the way for Linux (although one or more of the BSDs could have filled that niche instead, had a fully unencumbered[5][PDF] BSD become available sooner) to have the level of adoption it ended up having.
VMS has always been proprietary, despite the name, and is still an expensive[4] option for commercial use
I mean Olsen was kind of right. Most VAX sold didn't run Unix and VMS and VAX were incredibly successful. Unix at that time was successful on workstations more then servers.
And by the time Unix became successful it was as complex arguably VMS was at the time.
DEC didn't fail because they supported VMS, in fact VMS was great costumer lock in for them and its still made money for HP despite being developed in the late 70s.
And in terms of clustering, Unix has never matched VMS.
DEC didn't fail because of VMS. Their big failure was not to make a fast RISC workstation that ran VMS early enough. And then in then in the late 80s not switching to RISC fast enough with VMS.
So I think he had a point, most serious banks and insurances did run VMS and paid lots of money for it for the next 20 years. VMS was not the reason DEC ran into issues. Their complete management of first personal systems, then workstations, then mainframes, then RISC servers is what destroyed them.
>I mean Olsen was kind of right. Most VAX sold didn't run Unix and VMS and VAX were incredibly successful. Unix at that time was successful on workstations more then servers.
>DEC didn't fail because they supported VMS, in fact VMS was great costumer lock in for them and its still made money for HP despite being developed in the late 70s.
>And in terms of clustering, Unix has never matched VMS.
Absolutely. Even the filesystem was made for redundancy and, AFAIK, no one has implemented the automated file versioning available to VMS back in the 1970s.
I used VMS at several jobs and it was both rock solid and light years ahead of Unix back in the 80s and 90s.
It's only funny because of how things turned out -- with VMS falling by the wayside for a variety of reasons.
Most folks these days think UNIX is the dinosaur, ignoring the BSDs that are still used (not even including MacOS) for many purposes and while they never got the kind of reliability/redundancy that VMS (or AS/400, for that matter) enjoyed, Sun (SunOS/Solaris), HP (HP/UX) and DEC (Ultrix) did provide levels of reliability still unheard of in linux.
When I first saw that Olsen quote (early '90s) I thought it was funny because Unix had come pretty far since 1984 (when that quote was published).
I thought of it because the comment[0] to which I responded reminded me of Olsen's quote when they pointed a finger at Sun for taking the attitude that Linux was a hobbiest[sic] OS.
Which wasn't all that wrong either. Given that MINIX was the model for Linux and MINIX definitely was a hobbyist/proof-of-concept OS, not something that was actually useful.
My thought was mostly that "times change, people don't."
I think it worked out for the best. That said if we had Linus implementing LVMS instead of Linux history might not be that different.
I think one serious issue was that they took way long to realize portability.
They had rough group implement MICA OS that was supposed to be partially compatible. But the dropped MICA and PRISM and instead adopted MIPS and Ultrix. But then they never bothered to port VMS onto MIPS and their workstation line.
Then they mismanaged their whole VAX line and massive lost out to the improving Unix offerings, partly for performance and partly for 'openness' reason.
I think if they were smart they would either have gone 'all-in' on MICA and make it the future of both Unix and VMS. Or simply support both Unix and VMS on all of their platform. They were big enough that this wasn't some incredibly complex task.
They ported VMS to Alpha, but that was a 64bit machine that most people didn't need. Meaning they lost in the lower spec server spaces where Sun and HP were selling tons of Unix servers.
Had they ported VMS to MIPS and also had sold lower spec server with all these features, VMS might not have become so niche.
Personally I really believe that their complete mishandling of RISC, despite having arguably the best chip design team in the industry to be the reason for much of their failure.
onraglanroad · · focus · HN ↗
It seemed to me like they couldn't decide whether they were a hardware company or a software company.
Mind you, I was young at the time so possibly didn't have the best understanding of the situation. Seems like they left the decision too late though.
Dismissing Linux as a hobbiest OS definitely turned out badly.
nobody9999 · · focus · HN ↗
That actually made me laugh. Not because it's untrue, but because it reminded me of this:
onraglanroad · · focus · HN ↗
It's basically does Linux win or why not BSD? Never what about OpenVMS.
nobody9999 · · focus · HN ↗
VMS has always been proprietary, despite the name, and is still an expensive[4] option for commercial use
[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Berkeley_Software_Distribution" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Berkeley_Softwa...
[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix
[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS
[4] <a href="https://vmssoftware.com/products/licenses/" rel="nofollow">https://vmssoftware.com/products/licenses/
[5] <a href="https://dn721902.ca.archive.org/0/items/att_unix_licenses_1982/supp_ag_customer_cpu_020178_090180_text.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://dn721902.ca.archive.org/0/items/att_unix_licenses_19...
nobody9999 · · focus · HN ↗
>It's basically does Linux win or why not BSD? Never what about OpenVMS.
While my original reply was accurate, it could have, more concisely, read:
panick21_ · · focus · HN ↗
And by the time Unix became successful it was as complex arguably VMS was at the time.
DEC didn't fail because they supported VMS, in fact VMS was great costumer lock in for them and its still made money for HP despite being developed in the late 70s.
And in terms of clustering, Unix has never matched VMS.
DEC didn't fail because of VMS. Their big failure was not to make a fast RISC workstation that ran VMS early enough. And then in then in the late 80s not switching to RISC fast enough with VMS.
So I think he had a point, most serious banks and insurances did run VMS and paid lots of money for it for the next 20 years. VMS was not the reason DEC ran into issues. Their complete management of first personal systems, then workstations, then mainframes, then RISC servers is what destroyed them.
nobody9999 · · focus · HN ↗
>DEC didn't fail because they supported VMS, in fact VMS was great costumer lock in for them and its still made money for HP despite being developed in the late 70s.
>And in terms of clustering, Unix has never matched VMS.
Absolutely. Even the filesystem was made for redundancy and, AFAIK, no one has implemented the automated file versioning available to VMS back in the 1970s.
I used VMS at several jobs and it was both rock solid and light years ahead of Unix back in the 80s and 90s.
It's only funny because of how things turned out -- with VMS falling by the wayside for a variety of reasons.
Most folks these days think UNIX is the dinosaur, ignoring the BSDs that are still used (not even including MacOS) for many purposes and while they never got the kind of reliability/redundancy that VMS (or AS/400, for that matter) enjoyed, Sun (SunOS/Solaris), HP (HP/UX) and DEC (Ultrix) did provide levels of reliability still unheard of in linux.
When I first saw that Olsen quote (early '90s) I thought it was funny because Unix had come pretty far since 1984 (when that quote was published).
I thought of it because the comment[0] to which I responded reminded me of Olsen's quote when they pointed a finger at Sun for taking the attitude that Linux was a hobbiest[sic] OS.
Which wasn't all that wrong either. Given that MINIX was the model for Linux and MINIX definitely was a hobbyist/proof-of-concept OS, not something that was actually useful.
My thought was mostly that "times change, people don't."
[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790242">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49790242
panick21_ · · focus · HN ↗
I think one serious issue was that they took way long to realize portability.
They had rough group implement MICA OS that was supposed to be partially compatible. But the dropped MICA and PRISM and instead adopted MIPS and Ultrix. But then they never bothered to port VMS onto MIPS and their workstation line.
Then they mismanaged their whole VAX line and massive lost out to the improving Unix offerings, partly for performance and partly for 'openness' reason.
I think if they were smart they would either have gone 'all-in' on MICA and make it the future of both Unix and VMS. Or simply support both Unix and VMS on all of their platform. They were big enough that this wasn't some incredibly complex task.
They ported VMS to Alpha, but that was a 64bit machine that most people didn't need. Meaning they lost in the lower spec server spaces where Sun and HP were selling tons of Unix servers.
Had they ported VMS to MIPS and also had sold lower spec server with all these features, VMS might not have become so niche.
Personally I really believe that their complete mishandling of RISC, despite having arguably the best chip design team in the industry to be the reason for much of their failure.
onraglanroad · · focus · HN ↗
Long time since I've been sic'd! Ok, got it wrong but at least you know my comments aren't llm'd...