Comment by tombert

5 hours ago

The DEC stuff feels like a foreign country to me.

Most of the world is powered by Unix (and its clones/derivatives), at least in the infrastructure space, with a small percent still running Windows Server for some masochistic reason. Outside of playing with OpenVMS exactly one time with qemu (purely because I kind of liked their goofy shark logo [1]), I've never used anything from DEC, but throughout the 80s my understanding is that DEC was a force to be reckoned with. I think there was probably more diversity in operating systems back then.

The DEC stuff was huge for a period of time, and I feel like there's an alternate universe where VMS and VAX stayed the standard, and Unix is the footnote. I'm not sure that universe would be better, there's probably a reason that Unix won overall, but it's not like DEC and VAX were tiny things.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Dec-vms-...

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tombert

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nineteen999  4 hours ago

I had a bunch of DEC Alpha's 21164 back in the late 90's I absolutely loved those machines except from the ARC/SRM firmware which was pretty horrible. We also had a Sparc64 board/CPU from Sun Microelectronics which we put in our tower case, added SCSI, video cards etc and ran Solaris. I also worked for a 3rd-party Sun clone maker around that time, we had piles of Sparc/Sparc64 boards sitting round.

UNIX probably won out due to licensing and the fact that it was available on x86-64 so much earlier - mainly Linux and BSD I guess but Solaris was there as well, VMS didn't boot on x86-64 until 2019.

  • ofrzeta  4 hours ago

    Everyone loved the Alpha machines when they came out as far as I remember. I also liked Digital Unix a lot more than Solaris or HP-UX though I don't remember any particular reason, probably completely irrational :)