I miss the wide diversity of operating systems and computer architectures that we had in the 80s and 90s. It was exciting watching them all compete with each other and cross-pollinate good ideas.
It also still blows my mind that out of all of the Unix vendors from the 90s, it was Apple that became the dominant Unix workstation vendor.
You know what's even more mind-blowing about Apple?
They've resolutely stayed far away from the server market. Apple computers just won't be found serving web pages, operating cloud services, hosting storage arrays or anything. There are no rackmount Apples, no back-office Apples. They're all-in on the consumer market, and really concentrating on home users. Apples used in business settings work because of their high quality and excellent integration, and in spite of their non-enterprise focus.
If you try to spin up a macOS VM in the cloud, Avril Lavigne's band will invade your data center, and they will film a music video in front of the most pitiful rack.
How many Unix workstations in a museum were from brands who were slummin' it, because they put big iron in every existing data center, and leveraged their resources to miniaturize all that and bring a mainframe or mini to every engineer's desk?
Also, Apple managed to tackle and really solve many features where Unix has a bad reputation. GUI/UX integration; hardware interfaces such as audiovisual, multimedia; software installation and management; sandboxing and strict access control for untrusted apps; integrated backup solutions.
Yes, it's mind-blowing that their "unofficial motto", "It Just Works" can be applied to something under the hood (FreeBSD) that is better known as the realm of tinkerers, hobbyists, and people whose tower PCs have excellent ventilation, because they don't even bother to fasten the case to the chassis anymore.
I miss the wide diversity of operating systems and computer architectures that we had in the 80s and 90s. It was exciting watching them all compete with each other and cross-pollinate good ideas.
It also still blows my mind that out of all of the Unix vendors from the 90s, it was Apple that became the dominant Unix workstation vendor.
You know what's even more mind-blowing about Apple?
They've resolutely stayed far away from the server market. Apple computers just won't be found serving web pages, operating cloud services, hosting storage arrays or anything. There are no rackmount Apples, no back-office Apples. They're all-in on the consumer market, and really concentrating on home users. Apples used in business settings work because of their high quality and excellent integration, and in spite of their non-enterprise focus.
If you try to spin up a macOS VM in the cloud, Avril Lavigne's band will invade your data center, and they will film a music video in front of the most pitiful rack.
How many Unix workstations in a museum were from brands who were slummin' it, because they put big iron in every existing data center, and leveraged their resources to miniaturize all that and bring a mainframe or mini to every engineer's desk?
Also, Apple managed to tackle and really solve many features where Unix has a bad reputation. GUI/UX integration; hardware interfaces such as audiovisual, multimedia; software installation and management; sandboxing and strict access control for untrusted apps; integrated backup solutions.
Yes, it's mind-blowing that their "unofficial motto", "It Just Works" can be applied to something under the hood (FreeBSD) that is better known as the realm of tinkerers, hobbyists, and people whose tower PCs have excellent ventilation, because they don't even bother to fasten the case to the chassis anymore.