I also recall that Linux on a PC often beat the performance of Unix equipment I could access in contemporary times. There was a lore around those machines, but my actual experience doing basic FOSS-adjacent dev work (bash, make, gcc, autoconf) was that the Linux PC was faster as well as inexpensive.
The exceptions were mostly hardware graphics accelerators in some labs, when my Linux PC had to do it in software. And I got myself a surplus DEC Multia (alpha) that was really fast with Linux for natively compiled code, beating my contemporary 486DX3-100. But, the PC was still faster for web browsing, because running Netscape on alpha meant doing x86 emulation!
Likewise, my ~90 MHz Pentium MMX laptop with Linux was faster at regular dev work on my work-supplied Sun Ultra workstation in the late 90s. (Edit: Hmm, I am not sure about this laptop anymore, it might have been 166 MHz??)
Due to my positive experiences, I was an aggressive early adopter (and frequent beta tester) of nearly every Linux ecosystem frontier for decades. E.g. 2D accelerators, 3D accelerators, SMP, large file support, gigabit ethernet, wireless ethernet, power management, virtualization, 64 bit architectures, SCSI/SATA/Firewire/e-SATA/NVME, hardware and MD-RAID, ext2/ext3/xfs/btrfs, ...
"Free", until mid 90s I guess most people bought Linux distros on CDs, later DVD (no downloads). For me the big, big plus on Linux (vs. Dos / Windows), had been all the free compilers.
I'd have to say that gcc is the unsung hero of FOSS. If you wanted compilers on your shiny new commercial-UNIX box, you either had to fork out $$$ or find a way to get the GNU toolchain into place. Even on PCs compilers tended to cost a lot, with Borland being a shining exception.
Somewhere, I still have a Red Hat 5 retail CD. I'm not sure, but I might have bought it at Borders Books rather than a computer shop. I know I bought a few CD-ROM collections at the bookstore.
to be fair, nobody in 1990 decided between NeXT and Linux, because (A) Linux didn’t exist yet and (B) they were / would have been completely different markets and totally different capabilities.
I also recall that Linux on a PC often beat the performance of Unix equipment I could access in contemporary times. There was a lore around those machines, but my actual experience doing basic FOSS-adjacent dev work (bash, make, gcc, autoconf) was that the Linux PC was faster as well as inexpensive.
The exceptions were mostly hardware graphics accelerators in some labs, when my Linux PC had to do it in software. And I got myself a surplus DEC Multia (alpha) that was really fast with Linux for natively compiled code, beating my contemporary 486DX3-100. But, the PC was still faster for web browsing, because running Netscape on alpha meant doing x86 emulation!
Likewise, my ~90 MHz Pentium MMX laptop with Linux was faster at regular dev work on my work-supplied Sun Ultra workstation in the late 90s. (Edit: Hmm, I am not sure about this laptop anymore, it might have been 166 MHz??)
Due to my positive experiences, I was an aggressive early adopter (and frequent beta tester) of nearly every Linux ecosystem frontier for decades. E.g. 2D accelerators, 3D accelerators, SMP, large file support, gigabit ethernet, wireless ethernet, power management, virtualization, 64 bit architectures, SCSI/SATA/Firewire/e-SATA/NVME, hardware and MD-RAID, ext2/ext3/xfs/btrfs, ...
Exactly. Free vs. $8k (in 1990 dollars) for a NeXT computer was a pretty easy choice for most people.
"Free", until mid 90s I guess most people bought Linux distros on CDs, later DVD (no downloads). For me the big, big plus on Linux (vs. Dos / Windows), had been all the free compilers.
I'd have to say that gcc is the unsung hero of FOSS. If you wanted compilers on your shiny new commercial-UNIX box, you either had to fork out $$$ or find a way to get the GNU toolchain into place. Even on PCs compilers tended to cost a lot, with Borland being a shining exception.
Somewhere, I still have a Red Hat 5 retail CD. I'm not sure, but I might have bought it at Borders Books rather than a computer shop. I know I bought a few CD-ROM collections at the bookstore.
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to be fair, nobody in 1990 decided between NeXT and Linux, because (A) Linux didn’t exist yet and (B) they were / would have been completely different markets and totally different capabilities.
True. I think linux maybe had just been released but there was nothing like a "distro" that was easy to install.
Minix existed at the time too, I know because I ran it on an 8088 PC.
But within a few years, linux started gaining mindshare and was starting to replace proprietary unix especially on individual PCs.
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