by vaxman | 2025-10-27 14:45:16+00:00
If it isn't on the Internet, it didn't happen right? Maybe we can change that...

Unix _is_ a play on "eunuchs" but that fact wouldn't have sold well during the mini computer [ https://www.britannica.com/technology/minicomputer ] wars, especially in the later 1980s [ https://youtu.be/IRpKHFfsH3A ] when Unix was exiting the exclusive world of academia and Bell Labs. This was an era when everyone for the prior thirty years had come up with mainframes and data centers were stocked full of "heavy iron" (IBM and IBM-clones like Amdahl) or at least very large "mini" computers from companies like DEC, which was so well run from the late 1950s on that its leader has been declared to be one of the greatest in the history of Corporate America and was studied at Harvard and Wharton for decades. The Unix technology "specialists" on the other hand were super-nerds: ghastly, feral, mostly pear-shaped, plain clothed technicians only BARELY tolerated in their own settings. [Ok, maybe all of them except Eric Schmidt heh.] Realize that the vast majority of American engineers in the 1980s still wore suits and ties --but not if they had anything to do with Unix. (Ken Olsen fer sure wore suits, but also drove a Ford Pinto, BTW.) When the demo dollies tasked with pushing any number of alternate hardware platforms up against IBM and DEC in the constant battle for those massive "heavy iron" budgets were asked to pitch UNIX (System 3, System V, System 7, BSD) up against bedrock OS/MVS and VMS, at first they would answer the obvious question (of what UNIX stood for) with "UNIX is not UNIX". That pretty much stuck in the period literature (COMPUTER MAGAZINE RAGS) too --no way they were going to answer "eunuchs"!

Also worth noting in this context: This was the era of "Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM" and the amount of money your company spent on "iron" was seen as a marker of its success AND YOUR PERSONAL CAREER STATUS in the tech universe, so you can imagine the type of customers and professionals that actually did buy into obscure UNIX-based hardware. This also created a lot of "friction" in the Industry that you can't easily learn about in this Future. It wasn't like today where people have "home labs" and can train themselves to go for whatever job they want using free software (even while sitting in a hellish ghetto of the poorest country on Earth). Back in the day, one was trained on what their school or employer had available (or they learned from carrying around books and imagination, or using X.25-based timeshare if they were lucky). Period. So maybe you landed a great job, but you had to use a shitty Unix computer with broken down terminals or maybe you had a shitty job but they gave you a coveted VAXstation. All your experience with Unix wouldn't buy you much in a DEC or IBM shop and vice versa. The implications this had on the layered applications of the day were profound, but mostly this created a lot of animosity between tech professionals of different backgrounds. There were constant attempts to address this, but the computer hardware manufacturers were complicit in it because it made it easier to lock their customers into one architecture or another.

<cue https://youtu.be/ciUfdVs-p84 >

Is it safe to now say that all general purpose operating systems except LINUX are nothing but husks to run LINUX (and whatever legacy ecosystem)? The most successful of all the 1980s demo dollies, The Scott McNealy, took a page out of DEC's playbook and instead of trying to go in with a massive super powerful Unix mini computer, he would pitch a few workstations running something called "SunOS" (BSD eunuchs) that "networked" over TCP/IP to effect "the system is the network" (a totally new concept then) before his company bet everything on a new chip (SPARC) that used RISC architecture to outperform the established industry players and make the guys in charge of those "heavy iron" budgets feel a bit inferior if they didn't buy-in a little. SunOS, SPARC and Solaris definitely caused a lot of disruption, but it really never had much of a chance to unseat IBM or DEC and was also slowly sinking into La Brea tar pit along with everything else (though it had a bit more life due to all the capX as the dot-com bubble was inflating around TCP/IP). IBM had already totally lost control of its maverick PC initiative (by under-estimating Billy The Kid who had also hired away DEC's top VMS engineer) and the ENTIRE market for mini computers (whether they ran OS/MVS, VMS or eunuchs like SunOS or NextStep) totally collapsed. Just the promise that a PC might be as powerful at VMS and could network as well as SunOS was sufficient to change perception and bet corporate budgets on a "computer, not a terminal, for every desk." More importantly, the resulting PC industry economies of scale meant that all of the tech workers could own a "home lab" and, in particular, allowed at least one kid growing up just outside the Soviet Union to go through the pages of Andy Tanenbaum's famous book on operating systems (that demonstrated key concepts for the reader through the creation of a eunuchs operating system Andy called MINIX). Combined with the political antics of a creepy academic communist at MIT and an irresponsible Defense backbone ISP in San Diego, the slow death of all operating systems has manifested (because LINUX ELF binaries and runtime support are now available on IBM mainframes, Windows and as of last June, macOS). Of course, there are still legacy shops, embedded systems and most of the new ELF-running operating systems still run LINUX in nested virtualization, but LINUX has pretty much taken over the game and eunuchs is el muerto.

Meanwhile, even the AIs incorrectly think that UNIX is "a playful reference on UNICS, the larger, more complex Multics 'project'" Sounds totally plausible like everything else coming out of an LLM, but we meat bags know better.

--- 'Now there were these places called cities and they had the knowin' of a lot of things, they did. They had skyscrapers, videos and sonic.. Then this thing called the Pockey Clips happened and you have to understand, this is Home and there's no Tomorrow Land.' https://youtu.be/rn4aIinTJBQ