Let down? LOL! Unix is everywhere! From the tiniest to the hugest. Both iOS and Android are Unix-based, as is the largest pool of computing resources in the world, the GOOG.
We lost two giants in a week. One early. And one really early.
A wavey mirror for me... Last month, mom and brother-in-law.
I'm worn out with funerals.
And then, this month, around le lune chasseur.... we lose Jobs and Richie.
The last part of 2011 is starting to suck.
I say that from a personal level. I speak only for me and the local catz.
/johnny
It’s everywhere *now*. Back then, the “Unix Mafia” was just starting their domination. And compared to other operating systems/environments on workstations (Lisp Machines, Symbolics, VAXstations running VMS), other computing environments like TOPS on DECsystem 20’s, Unix was this red-headed stepchild. It was cheap[er], but it was rough as a cob by comparison to the more polished systems. Unix back then was a great system.... for a programmer. You didn’t dare allow a mere user to run loose with a Unix system.
In Ye Olde Days, when a Unix system crashed, you mostly had to just sit there with your thumb up your butt, wondering what happened. On a mainframe or VAX/VMS system, the OS shipped with tools to help you debug the crash from the crash dump. Most VMS crashes I had to debug took me no more than about 30 minutes and I would know exactly what happened and why. My mainframe cohorts sometimes took longer to find their answers (especially when they were running VM/370), but only maybe an hour longer.
Unix systems? Heh. Oh, the fun we’d have. I think the worst Unix crashes I had to debug were on AT&T 3B2 systems. What a steaming pile those were... going from BSD 4.3 on a VAX back to SysVR2 with none of the BSD tools most of us took for granted was like going through heroin withdrawal. It was pretty plain to see that the future of Unix was not going to come “from the phone company.”