Nick Maclaren <nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
+---------------
| All of this is true, but does not explain why it was Unix rather than
| any of the others.
|
| The explanation is almost certainly that it was freely available to
| USA universities, especially those in Silicon Valley, and some people
| from those places started up the workstation companies.
+---------------
Two timely factors that were *extremely* significant to companies like
Onyx Systems and Fortune Systems (and later, Sun):
1. The introduction of the "Binary Sub-License, Limited Number of Users"
license by AT&T in 1980 (early '81?). Previously, Unix could only
be obtained via a source license of (for commercial sites) ~$25K...
PER CPU! [Yes, there were discounts for volumes, but not large ones.
And the price for later versions rose to over $130K.] But suddenly,
any organization that had at least one source license could get
*binary* licenses for a few hundred bucks per machine!! And more
importantly, this new license permitted a company to sell *further*
binary-only sublicenses to *their* customers, with specific royalties
going back to AT&T. Those royalties were discounted according to the
*total* cumulative royalty payment, so that by the time you'd paid
a million dollars or so (IIRC), the incremental price-per-CPU for a
16-user license was less than $80. Almost overnight, this completely
changed the economics of using Unix versus cooking up a homegrown O/S!!
2. At the same time, Steve Ward's research group at MIT picked Unix to
run on their NuMachine and ported it (including the "PCC" C compiler)
to the Zilog Z8000, the Intel 8086, and the Motorola 68000. More to the
point, they *GAVE AWAY* their working port to anyone who asked politely
and had a valid Unix source license from AT&T. This enabled a *huge*
number of Unix startups to jump-start their development, especially
the 68k-based ones such as Fortune Systems (1981) and Sun (1982). As
noted at <URL:http://www.lcs.mit.edu/about/architects.html>:
Although it would not be clear for several years, by building a
single-user computer with a bitmapped display, a network interface,
and a powerful microprocessor, Ward's group had just created one
of the world's first UNIX workstations.
Over the next decade, Ward's group became a clearinghouse of
sorts for UNIX operating system ports. Many companies that
created commercial UNIX workstations, including Sun Microsystems,
started with a UNIX system that had either been sent to them
from LCS or was directly descended from another system that was.
Put #1 & #2 together, and there was practically no other choice for a
small startup to use. When Fortune Systems showed it's first system at
Comdex in Fall 1981, there were but a handful of other desktop/deskside
microprocessor-based Unix systems companies there. But by the Fall 1982
Comdex, there were nearly three dozen!!
-Rob
p.s. One other significant factor, though much less so than the above two:
3. The availability in the same time frame of production quantities of
the then-new 64 Kbit NMOS DRAM chips, which made the "huge" amounts
of memory needed for Unix systems (a whole megabyte, imagine that!!)
feasible for "low-cost" commercial systems, those in the under-$5000
market segment.
-----
Rob Warnock, PP-ASEL-IA <rpw3@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue <URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403 (650)572-2607