Before Linux, there was Unix. It was great, but it was and has been plagued by problems with licensing and proprietary competition. [Vintage Appartus] recalls, for example, the AT&T Unix PC from the 1980s. It was awesome, but you’ve probably never heard of it. For 1985, it was a nice setup. You got a 10 MHz Motorola 68010, 512K of RAM (but upgradable to 4M), a floppy, a modem, a 720×384 monochrome screen, and a 10 or 20 MB hard drive. You can check out the video explaining the machine and its problems below.
Physically, the computer looked like a high-end Apple ][ with a removable keyboard and a built-in monitor. Expansion was via three slots. Cold start took about three minutes, and then you have a fairly normal Unix setup for the period.
The sample machine uses a disk emulator, so the video shows the computer running much faster than it would with a real period hard drive. The card also has an 8086 expansion board that can boot MSDOS, an important feature in 1985.
We’d like to see inside the box. Why did it fail? The video says it was very slow and since Unix does more than DOS, it was perceived as very slow compared to an IBM PC. This was made worse by a very slow hard drive that was prone to failure. The price didn’t help. Apparently, the list price at introduction was $15,000. A comparable IBM AT was around half of that. To make the machine really usable, you’d have to throw even more money at it.
While 1985-era Unix isn’t as nice as what we have today, if you spent time on older versions, you’d appreciate what it does do. Unix workstations did have their day, and they were great. But your desktop will probably run circles around even the best of them today.
One of my early jobs just out of college was as part of the team porting and writing accounting software using a bunch of Olivetti M20s, an AT&T 3B2 & an AT&T 3B1 aka AT&T Unix PC
and yes half my day was spent leaning over the cubicle asking my team lead to please kill my session as i’d frozen my terminal AGAIN
It’s like that again. We’re running docker images on a cloud computing platform and half the day is spent waiting for someone to fix the server so it doesn’t bug out or drop the connection every five minutes.
Actually they are very popular at the MARCH chapter in NJ at Infoage. One shows up from time-to-time as they shuffle their museum spaces. And one was out and basking in the attention with an exhibitor in the show last month. For the longest I worked over an AT&T PC 6300 and then the one with native 80286. But I’d longed for one of the UNIX PC fellows.
if/when linux becomes more popular, all our desktops will become unix workstations by any functional measure. macOS computers are already there.
2027 will be the year of the Linux desktop!
and GNU/Turd is almost ready so by 2030 it should be able to fully replace Linux kernel.
And the German local governments will switch their employee workstations to a custom Linux distribution, and then back to Windows a couple years later.
“back to Windows a couple years later.”
If I had the cash to throw around like M$ does, I could have them
running 8086/87 puters again.
If they do go back, that will be why. And a few will be much richer in the end.
Ah, you mean like it happened with LiMux in Munich.. Yeah, that was sad to watch.
But now there’s also the state of Schleswig-Holstein that’s going Linux/Open Source.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/schleswig_holstein_open_source/
https://www.schleswig-holstein.de/DE/landesregierung/themen/digitalisierung/linux-plus1/Projekt
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig-Holstein
Last but not least, France goverment is using Linux, too.
Their police offices seem to use it for quite a while already.
In late 2013, Ballmer came to visit Munich’s then-mayor Christian Ude and was like “nice city you got there, it would certainly be a catastrophic if we situated our national offices, along with all the attendant jobs, elsewhere”
https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/
(You can’t make this stuff up.)
A new mayor took office in 2014, and declared that he was a “huge Microsoft fan”. A task force was establlished to switch back to MS products, and Munich got a prestige-architecture office complex and became German Microsoft HQ.
https://news.microsoft.com/europe/features/microsoft-in-munich/
In 2017, they switched away from Linux.
I’m certain that the city has profited from the new jobs and the tax revenue, and as long as Dieter Reiter didn’t personally take any money, I don’t think that it’s technically bribery.
I do not think this is ethical behavior on the part of Microsoft. But they could not afford the high-profile black eye either, I guess.
I hope Paris gets a sweet Microsoft campus out of the deal. :) We’ll see how many of them MS can afford to build.
The TRS-80 Model 16, which could run the XENIX variant of UNIX, didn’t sell well either.
Professor had one with a Winchester drive singing away.
It’s always astonishing to look back at the price of computers in the 1980s. When i was a teenager around 1994ish i got a free hand-me-down IBM PC XT that i used as a dumb terminal and it just blows my mind that it was $5000 new only a decade earlier. By the time i got ahold of it, it was the very picture of e-waste. Even i didn’t find much to do with it.
And now people are again paying top dollar for these old machines to relive their glory days, use in minimalist setups, or refresh their aging equipment.
The US Coast Guard ran specialized Unix set ups for their COMDAC (Command, Display and Control) navigation and ARPA (radar) computers up until about 2015-ish. Yes, we had dedicated a Unix “navigation computer”, with a loud mechanical keyboard and track balls the size of a grapefruit.
The graphics were 16-bit color over a black background like the top down and side scrolling PC games from the early 90s. The COMDAC side was for navigation and tactical maneuvering and it shared data with the ARPA side. The whole thing was part of the C4ISR suite.
It really did look like a military movie from the late 80s. As much as I complained about it not being “high tech”, it worked. Every time, without fail. Once I learned the system I actually got pretty fast at hooking targets and laying down track lines for navigation. The best part of the Unix system was stability and boot time. It did what all good tools do, two, maybe three jobs really well, and that’s it.
The windows based replacement we got was… a dumpster fire that slowly progressed into a burning landfill.