I saw the collapse of commercial Unix from the view of a software provider. When I started my current job in 1995, we provided software for OSF/64 on Alpha, HP-UX on PA-RISC, Irix on MIPS, Solaris on SPARC and AIX on POWER. Also Windows NT on x86-32 and Alpha, and VMS on VAX and Alpha. Everything was 32-bit except for OSF/64.
The only commercial Unix we added subsequently was HP-UX on Itanium. That was outlived, for us, by the PA-RISC version. We did 64-bit versions for both HP-UXes, Irix, Solaris and AIX.
The thing that killed the commercial RISC platforms was the lower cost and broad compatibility of PC-derived hardware, achieved through economy of scale. Once AMD introduced x86-64, the RISCs' days were numbered and without needing many fingers. The low price of Windows NT and Linux compared to the commercial Unixes meant that none of them were worth porting to x86-64.
Incidentally, SCO Xenix carried a Microsoft albatross. When MS sold Xenix to Real SCO, there was a clause that required it to remain capable of running applications for the then-current version. Forever. Since it was 286-based at the time this greatly handicapped its development. That's why people I know who had to port an X.400 package to SCO Xenix called it "ScumOS" well before the Caldera nonsense started.
We first did Linux in 1999 with Red Hat Linux 6 on x86-32, did 64-bit quite early, and added ARM64 more recently.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2025-04-04 09:21 pm (UTC)The only commercial Unix we added subsequently was HP-UX on Itanium. That was outlived, for us, by the PA-RISC version. We did 64-bit versions for both HP-UXes, Irix, Solaris and AIX.
The thing that killed the commercial RISC platforms was the lower cost and broad compatibility of PC-derived hardware, achieved through economy of scale. Once AMD introduced x86-64, the RISCs' days were numbered and without needing many fingers. The low price of Windows NT and Linux compared to the commercial Unixes meant that none of them were worth porting to x86-64.
Incidentally, SCO Xenix carried a Microsoft albatross. When MS sold Xenix to Real SCO, there was a clause that required it to remain capable of running applications for the then-current version. Forever. Since it was 286-based at the time this greatly handicapped its development. That's why people I know who had to port an X.400 package to SCO Xenix called it "ScumOS" well before the Caldera nonsense started.
We first did Linux in 1999 with Red Hat Linux 6 on x86-32, did 64-bit quite early, and added ARM64 more recently.