[TUHS] System Economics (was is Linux "officially branded UNIX")

Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com
Wed Mar 15 00:43:51 AEST 2017


On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 7:35 AM, Tim Bradshaw <tfb at tfeb.org> wrote:

> But the people who have spent 9-figure sums on all this
> marginally-functional tin that the Unix vendors foisted on them don't
> look at it that way: they just want something which is not Unix, and
> which runs on cheap tin.
>
​Fair enough -- but I think that this is really another way of describing
Prof. Christiansen's disruption theory​.   The "lessor" technology wins
over "better" technology because it's good enough.

I'm curious for the Banks, in your experience - which were the UNIX vendors
that were pushing 9-figure UNIX boxes.  I'll guess, IBM was one of them.
Maybe NCR.     What HP, Sun, DEC in that bundle?



>  Linux is not Unix, and runs on cheap tin.
>
I
​believe that
 the point you are making is that "white box" PC's running a UNIX-like
system - aka Linux could comes pretty close to doing what the highly touted
AIX, NCR et al were doing and were "good enough" to get the job done.

​And that's not a statement about UNIX as much as a statement about, the
WINTEL ecosystem, that Linux sat on top of and did an extremely impressive
job of utilizing.
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