> System languages like PL/I, BLISS, Modula-2, would have had a different adoption if UNIX wasn't basically free beer with a recipe on how to make it.
You always say that. And I always call BS on it. I don't expect to persuade you, replying for the Nth time, but I have a couple of things I want you to think about.
"Not free" sometimes beats "free". People buy cars even in cities that have public transit. People paid for cable TV when over-the-air TV was free.
For this to happen, though, the not-free option has to deliver more value than the free version. With a car, I can go when I want; with public transit I have to wait. For many people, there's value in that. With cable I can watch 500 channels. There's value in that, at least for some people.
PL/I, Modula-2, and Pascal did not deliver more value than C - or at least not enough value to be worth the price of their compilers. Multics did not deliver more value than Unix - or at least, not enough more.
In fact, Multics had to reach a very high bar, because not only was Unix free, it ran on less-expensive hardware. The issue (probably) wasn't that Multics cost more than Unix; the issue was that Multics ran on hardware that cost a lot more than a PDP-11. Unix could have cost as much as Multics and still won, because the cost of the OS was not the dominant cost in the equation.
You often mention network effects - that Unix and C took over universities because they were free, and so everyone was using them, and so everyone knew how to use them, and so when they went somewhere else, they used what they knew. Go back to cable TV. Over-the-air TV had network effects - everyone was talking about the show they watched last night, and if you didn't watch it, you were left out. It was free advertising plus social pressure to be part of the "in" crowd. And yet cable still made money, and eventually grew into internet distribution, and still took away large amounts of market share from broadcast. Network effects can be overcome, if the product is actually closer to what people want.
So I think your explanation is too simplistic. It may have been a factor, but in the ahistorical world where Unix and C weren't free, I think they would have won anyway - still because of cost, but because of hardware cost.
> Multics didn't fail: it accomplished almost all of its stated goals. Unix succeeded too, solving a different problem.
Multics wouldn't have become what Unix became even if Unix wasn't there. It was pursuing different goals. And it turned out that Unix's goals had a lot bigger market than Multics's goals.
So, Unix had warts. But those warts were bearable because it met the needs of the market it addressed, and the other OSes didn't do so, or at least didn't do so as well.
Had UNIX been sold as commercial product, most likely the winner would have been something like VAX VMS, not Multics, which was anyway an OS for DoD only.
Or something else, definitely not UNIX, there was plenty of other alternatives when free would not have been an option, and UNIX haters book is still quite up to date in some of the original warts.
> Had UNIX been sold as commercial product, most likely the winner would have been something like VAX VMS
In the 70s and 80s, a lot of universities used VM/CMS for research and teaching. But then they ended up all migrating to some combination of UNIX and PCs running DOS/Windows.
In the 1980s, IBM was seriously pursuing the idea of a VM/CMS-based workstation – they ended up actually releasing the IBM 7437 VM/SP Technical Workstation in 1988, and it was adopted by some customers, primarily those who used the mainframe-based CAD systems CADAM and CATIA. But it just couldn't compete with UNIX workstations in the market. In an alternative timeline where UNIX was much less successful, it might have stood more of a chance.
Had VMS been any more wide spread, there would have been a VMS haters book.
I could make a start, referring to the default editor, EDIT. In the early nineties (no idea, what version that actually was) it was possible (and there was no warning) to edit the same file in multiple sessions (using multiple terminals by not-so-well communicating team members). Only the last file saved remained on disk.
I think that’s a reasonable argument, but in practice if Unix and C weren’t free it would have meant universities using tools that were closer to free — things like the UCSD p-system would have been more widespread. Different world; possibly a better one, if I’m right, which is unknowable.
You always say that. And I always call BS on it. I don't expect to persuade you, replying for the Nth time, but I have a couple of things I want you to think about.
"Not free" sometimes beats "free". People buy cars even in cities that have public transit. People paid for cable TV when over-the-air TV was free.
For this to happen, though, the not-free option has to deliver more value than the free version. With a car, I can go when I want; with public transit I have to wait. For many people, there's value in that. With cable I can watch 500 channels. There's value in that, at least for some people.
PL/I, Modula-2, and Pascal did not deliver more value than C - or at least not enough value to be worth the price of their compilers. Multics did not deliver more value than Unix - or at least, not enough more.
In fact, Multics had to reach a very high bar, because not only was Unix free, it ran on less-expensive hardware. The issue (probably) wasn't that Multics cost more than Unix; the issue was that Multics ran on hardware that cost a lot more than a PDP-11. Unix could have cost as much as Multics and still won, because the cost of the OS was not the dominant cost in the equation.
You often mention network effects - that Unix and C took over universities because they were free, and so everyone was using them, and so everyone knew how to use them, and so when they went somewhere else, they used what they knew. Go back to cable TV. Over-the-air TV had network effects - everyone was talking about the show they watched last night, and if you didn't watch it, you were left out. It was free advertising plus social pressure to be part of the "in" crowd. And yet cable still made money, and eventually grew into internet distribution, and still took away large amounts of market share from broadcast. Network effects can be overcome, if the product is actually closer to what people want.
So I think your explanation is too simplistic. It may have been a factor, but in the ahistorical world where Unix and C weren't free, I think they would have won anyway - still because of cost, but because of hardware cost.