While way too complex to accurately flesh out here, Linux took off mainly because the GNU userland had been in progress for almost a decade before and was ready, while the legal issues and rift on the 386BSD caused it to miss the window of common cdrom drives and the commercial internet.
But yes, I remember being forced to do some silly radio show in ~1997-8 where I was brought in to talk about Linux, as I had saved him a lot of money setting up DNS/Sendmail/Pop on PC's vs the decstations he was using.
Harley Hahn was the other person on the show, and despite Nasa and others using it, he was insistent that it would never replace commercial unix.
As I was maintaining OSF/1, SunOS, Irix, Interactive, SCO, AIX, AT&T, coherent UNIXs at that point, along with systems like MPE/IX, os400, OS/2, NT, Netware etc... day to day; it was quite obvious how much time and money it saved.
IIRC SCO single user desktop license w/networking was ~$800 and you had to pay another $600 more to get the development kit...without updates.
Obviously the huge bump in popularity was when LAMP became popular.
Comments
While way too complex to accurately flesh out here, Linux took off mainly because the GNU userland had been in progress for almost a decade before and was ready, while the legal issues and rift on the 386BSD caused it to miss the window of common cdrom drives and the commercial internet.
But yes, I remember being forced to do some silly radio show in ~1997-8 where I was brought in to talk about Linux, as I had saved him a lot of money setting up DNS/Sendmail/Pop on PC's vs the decstations he was using.
Harley Hahn was the other person on the show, and despite Nasa and others using it, he was insistent that it would never replace commercial unix.
As I was maintaining OSF/1, SunOS, Irix, Interactive, SCO, AIX, AT&T, coherent UNIXs at that point, along with systems like MPE/IX, os400, OS/2, NT, Netware etc... day to day; it was quite obvious how much time and money it saved.
IIRC SCO single user desktop license w/networking was ~$800 and you had to pay another $600 more to get the development kit...without updates.
Obviously the huge bump in popularity was when LAMP became popular.