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Hi. I am new here, and this is my first post at the UNIX.com forums. I have read the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, and I noticed that neither UNIX nor Linux was mentioned once in the book. Why is this? What was UNIX's place in the early days of personal computers?
To be fair, UNIX did not have much role in the early days of the personal computer. UNIX was more of a research operating system favored by scientists with little patience for fuffy user graphics. Also, UNIX was used as the core operating system for server projects and applications, NOT the desktop.
I think it is fair to say that UNIX did not make much of a contribution to desktop computing in the early days... Apple and the folks at Xerox Park took computing to the everyday user (and blew the socks off DOS!!!)... As you may recall, Microsoft copied the success of Apple (innovated) and responded with Windows... a still evolving architecture that is beginning to show promise in modern versions like W2K and XP.
Linux also made most of its early marks on the server side as web servers, DNS servers, mail relay servers, etc. Many people, like myself, use a combination of Linux and UNIX in the server side and MS on the desktop (I use XP Pro on the desktop and have to say that MS is moving in the right direction!!) I was using Linux in 1992, BTW, and still do.
UNIX and Linux are making inroads on the desktop and the new strategy of Apple with OS X will help that greatly (if the prices come down!!!) Most people running MS Office and other MS desktop software simply cannot afford the transition!!!! Imagine the expense of doing this for an organization with 500,000 users!
So, the bottom line is that the market for desktop users (commonly called the PC market) and the market for backend servers are very different markets.