Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft • Hacker News Board

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#151

Post by oblio » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 10:41 AM UTC

justinlardinois wrote: post #146

oblio wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web as envisioned early on by Netscape was supposed to have apps much sooner than it did. Once Microsoft swept aside Netscape by killing their business it basically froze development on IE. They made one mistake: XMLHttpRequest (probably the last big feature added to IE before the freeze) and we got lucky with Firefox.

I'm not sure Microsoft's lack of development on Internet Explorer in that era was due to an actual desire to kill the web. It simply had no competitors, so there was no motivation to make the product any better.

Microsoft killed Netscape to kill the thick client planned by Netscape to commoditize Windows. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft (just like Apple today) didn't want the web to succeeded as an app delivery method.

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#152

Post by albasha » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 8:22 PM UTC

pritambaral wrote: post #149

albasha wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bold claim. What's in it for Microsoft to build a shitty browser?

The less people use the web, the more they'll depend on the OS. Imagine if Facebook (or Slack) just had to build a native app for every OS they wanted users from, and there was no chance of using anything cross-platform to reach everyone. That would be the sweet utopia for the then Microsoft. Making the dominant browser shitty is not identical to that scenario, but goes a long way in discouraging an OS-agnostic platf…

So you are saying they are against web apps that replace native apps such as Google Docs and thus it was not in their best interest to make the browser powerful. Interesting.

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#153

Post by vram22 » Tue, Apr 05, 2016, 8:01 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #129

vram22 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. My first Unix was some PC-based clone, the name of which I cannot remember now, but was also a while before Linux. Not sure whether it was before Xenix or not, though I used Xenix (SCO Xenix at the time, IIRC, or was it SCO Unix) a year or so later. First Unix's name may have started with E-something. Everex? Not sure. I think I also got to use Interactive Systems' PC Unix (PC-IX?) around the same time as the f…

Thanks for sharing. I did Xenix, DG/UX, Aix, got my first Linux distribution in the form of Slackware 2.0. Tried to get Coherent before, but could not afford it. Afterwards Red-Hat, Mandrake and SuSE were my favourite ones until I ended up with Ubuntu. At work I also got to use Solaris and HP-UX. My first experience with containers was with HP-UX vaults. However I never managed to leave the worlds of Amiga, Windows a…

Thanks for sharing too - interesting.

Didn't know about HP-UX vaults. Maybe it came after I stopped using HP-UX, or I just missed it.

Edit: Just googled, it looks like vaults came in either HP-UX 10.24 or 11.x. Think I used HP-UX versions 9.x and upto 10.20.

You're lucky to have worked on Amiga [1]. Read a good amount about it, including its power and performance, multi-tasking, in BYTE etc., earlier, along with the Atari ST, though never got to use either.

(Still remember an Atari ST ad, probably a big deal at the time: "A megabyte of RAM for $x99!"). And where are we now in terms of RAM ...

[1] And had read about Carl Sassenrath, wow. Did all that stuff for the Amiga, and then goes and creates REBOL, maybe single-handedly (?), with the language, and the libs, and the GUI.

Good stuff.

Edit: typo.

Re: Head of Oracle Linux Moves to Microsoft

#154

Post by vram22 » Tue, Apr 05, 2016, 8:14 PM UTC

Ologn wrote: post #49

adamnemecek wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not linux but close https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix

Radio Shack used to sell TRS-80 Model 16 microcomputers running Xenix in their stores to business customers. At least up until the mid-1990s, many local Radio Shack stores were using these machines as their point-of-sale, inventory and financial systems. Xenix in general was the most widely used Unix in terms of installs into the late 1980s.

>Xenix in general was the most widely used Unix in terms of installs into the late 1980s.

Interesting, didn't know that ... Because PC hardware was cheaper and more ubiquitous, could be one reason, maybe.

On a related note, UNIX became big in India (people used to call it a Unix country) in the mid or late 1980's, per what I've read, because of a government decision on computerization. The Rangarajan Committee (he later became the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, which is like the US's Federal Reserve) recommended use of UNIX as the operating system for nationalized banks' back-office automation, because of its multi-user and multi-tasking nature (and possibly / likely because it was cheaper than mainframes, maybe even because less proprietary).

UNIX usage in India took off due to that (thousands and thousands of bank branches in India), and hence many devs and admins developed Unix skills ... I was part of that trend, and benefited from it a lot, professionally, in terms of learning ...