Nope - didn’t forget; as you pointed out MS gave up on Xenix in the late 80’s, and I specifically stated (as you quoted) “UNIX wasn’t even on Microsoft’s radar in the 90’s”.

MS did some stuff with UNIX in the 70s and 80s, but by the 90s they were all in on DOS/Windows and Windows NT, with a bit of Mac OS (before it was UNIX based).

Yaz

Strong disagree. While creative types have long favoured Mac, most hard-core developers and power users eschewed it for other platforms — until around 2003/2004, when OS X became mature enough and developers with UNIX-style toolchains moved over in droves.

Go back to relevant /. stories around that timeframe, and you’ll see how common it suddenly become to go to conferences and see 80%+ of developer laptops being PowerBooks (and later MacBook Pro’s). That was virtually unheard of just a year prior — and a lot of devs still prefer it to Windows, because most UNIX-style commands and toolchains “just work”.

Yaz

it was about beating OS/2.

Most of the other UNIX’s weren’t designed to run on 80x86 platforms, so they were never in any real contention with Microsoft. AIX, HPUX, Solaris, Dynix (which was Intel based but had a special architecture separate from PCs) — none of these were in the same market as Windows.

No, Microsoft’s target was OS/2 — which had a bigger resource footprint, but was also a vastly superior OS, with real pre-emptive multitasking, a (by 90’s standards) modern high performance file system, the ability to pre-emptively multitask Windows 3.x and DOS apps well before Windows 95, and a superiors desktop environment (a modern Workplace Shell would still absolutely slay). It was here that Microsoft introduced Win32s and kept changing it every few weeks to break OS/2 compatibility for newer Windows apps. It was here that the per-processor agreements were put into place with systems manufacturers to make selling OS/2 on systems more expensive (for those too young to know, in these agreements the manufacturer paid and charged for a Windows license with every system sold — even if it didn’t come with Windows. So if you wanted an OS/2 system you were paying for both OS/2 and a Windows license you didn’t actually get).

UNIX wasn’t even on Microsoft’s radar in the 90’s — it just wasn’t a PC operating system, and was mostly targeted to systems that didn’t compete with Microsoft. If you wanted a UNIX system, you had to buy your hardware from your OS vendor (much like with macOS today) — virtually nobody (except some of the early cool kids running Linux and *BSD) was buying white-box Intel systems and running UNIX — the numbers were too small for Microsoft to care. OS/2 was their real target — and in the end, it worked.

Yaz

Yes, I came here to see if anyone else made no sense of it. And it was the second post I saw.

Looks like they are jelly of Alexa's driving features and care more about upselling their AI in cars than selling consumer AI speakers.

I fully expect Google to sunset all their home automation eventually. It is what they do best.

Yep, never trust Google with your time or data.

That just points to how far behind the US is in decarbonizing its electrical infrastructure. That’s not really a knock on EVs.

Here in Canada, ~80% of our electricity is from hydroelectric sources, and ~90% is from non-carbon emitting sources (hydro, solar, wind, nuclear).

The good thing about running an EV in a jurisdiction which still uses CO2 emitting fuels for electrical generation is that you can knock down the CO2 emissions by just replacing the power plant, and not both the power plant and the vehicles. The EV effectively gets the upgrade “for free”.

Yaz

This goes back a very long way, but back when I was publishing The Sound Blaster Digest (early 90’s) I eventually started publishing using Windows Write on Windows 3.1 specifically because of OLE — I could package an “e-zine” with audio, graphics, fonts, and better formatting than the hand-formatted ASCII I was previously using. I continued with the ASCII format as well every month (which was a good deal of work) and released in both formats, but the Write version (being published at a time when HTML wasn’t accessible to the regular user) was always very popular for that reason. Embedding the media straight in a document every Windows user could use felt groundbreaking at the time.

Yaz

Back when my kids where be evaluated for school, one of the tasks was counting stacks of objects. The instructor had stacks of random things set up on the table. My daughter replied to each as the instructor pointed: 14.... 9....12... all without counting. Fast forward to today - we NEVER play SET (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1198/set) with her because she still has that ability to see objects and counts quickly. As soon as a card would be flipped she'd say SET and always be right. I suspect her abelites helped her with career/education (Aero Engineer BS, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Ph.D) now a professor at Stanford. Still don't play SET with her ;-)

Also still here, looking forward to hearing your take on it!

Vritualbox is not an enterprise system, and runs only on top of other OSes, and has no centralized management.

Chips and Dips, along with early Slashdot, had a bunch of Malda's personal links. Duckpins was an animation he made as an undergrad. He also linked a personal site for a couple of Windowmaker plugins that he'd written. I can't remember what the plugins were! I do remember that most plugins were mail notifiers or clocks.

I mapped ADVENT instead of learn Fortran 77, in 1981.

Bard will argue with you if you tell it is wrong about some things.

Some are here, even from Duckpins days. ;-)