Oh, certainly "NT Takes Over the World!" didn't happen, and in retrospect it seems somewhat naive that anyone ever thought that it would; let alone that it would put Unix into the grave. But those doomsday predictions seemed very much to be the order of the day.

Interestingly, I saw a lot of what was left of the minicomputer infrastructure around the campus I haunted (but bear in mind I was in high school at the time so had a weird perspective as an outside-insider) as well as a lot of mainframe stuff get replaced by NT. The Unix folks (especially those at the centralized computing facility) pretty much had the attitude that, "well, we're next..." but that never came to pass. But much VMS, whatever HP minicomputer stuff was floating around (MPE?) and all VM/CMS (I guess it was actually VM/ESA by that time) disappeared; VAXstations, serial terminals and 3179G's were all replaced by PCs running Windows and the users were replaced by these smiling robots. It was weird.

Somehow, most of the Unix people managed to escape. I wonder why? Part of my sense is that by and large the Unix people were more technically adept than the minicomputer and mainframe people, though to this day one of *the* most technically astute hackers I've ever seen was a diehard VMS guy. He came from TOPS-10 on the PDP-10, though, so maybe that's why. But certainly the median level of technical "clue" was higher amongst the Unix folks than the other communities. I wonder if that wasn't one of the primary factors that enabled folks to stay outside of the NT gravitational pull.

I wonder, too, if Unix networking didn't play a major role. I have this dim sense that NT was designed for a world in which it was still assumed that the OSI suite was going to win the networking wars. When, almost to everyone's surprise, the Internet ended up taking off Unix was already well-positioned to respond and NT had to play catch up.

I remember going to lunch one afternoon (I guess it was the summer because I didn't have school) and everyone was sitting around complaining about how horrible Microsoft was. One of the older sysadmins said something like, "you know, I can remember saying the exact same things about IBM 15 years ago. Now it's Microsoft. They won't last." I was rather incredulous that the enemy was not being recognized, let alone actively resisted. But in the end, he was absolutely right, and in retrospect it makes perfect sense: the price of hardware is being asymptotically driven to zero; given that, software cost becomes significant, giving rise to things like Linux as commercially viable alternatives to proprietary software. Given that, MS never stood a chance of long term dominance. Of course, as software cost goes to zero than the maintenance and other ongoing costs (space, power, etc) tend to dominate, giving rise to the cloud, etc.

        - Dan C.