XPost: alt.folklore.computers   
   From: bagel99@gmail.com   
      
   On 8/4/25 8:53 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:   
   > On Mon, 4 Aug 2025 17:18:24 -0500, BGB wrote:   
   >   
   >> The ban on AT&T was the whole reason they released Unix freely.   
   >   
   > It was never really “freely” available.   
   I'll say.  We had to pay $20,000 for it in 1975.  That was a lot   
   of money for software on a mini-computer.   
      
   >   
   >> Then when things lifted (after the AT&T break-up), they tried to   
   >> re-assert their control over Unix, which backfired.   
   >   
   > They were already tightening things up from the Seventh Edition onwards --   
   > remember, this version rescinded the permission to use the source code for   
   > classroom teaching purposes, neatly strangling the entire market for the   
   > legendary Lions Book. Which continued to spread afterwards via samizdat,   
   > nonetheless.   
   >   
   >> And, they tried to make and release a workstation, but by then they   
   >> were competing against the IBM PC Clone market (and also everyone   
   >> else trying to sell Unix workstations at the time), ...   
   >   
   > That was a very successful market, from about the mid-1980s until the mid-   
   > to-latter 1990s. In spite of all the vendor-lock-in and fragmentation, it   
   > mentioned to survive I think because of the sheer performance available in   
   > the RISC processors, which Microsoft tried to support with its new   
   > “Windows NT” OS, but was never able to get quite right.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)