People In The '80s Thought Unix Would Take Over. Here's Why They Were Right
How-To Geek, Saturday, November 16th, 2024
In the '80s, Unix was making its way out of the research labs and universities and into the real world. Some observers thought that Unix would seriously challenge the dominance of MS-DOS. How did their predictions hold up?
Why Unix Was Growing in the '80s
If you had watched PBS in the '80s, you might have tuned into a program called "The Computer Chronicles," which showed developments in the day's computing. One 1985 episode on Unix speculated that it might become "the standard operating system of the future."
Many observers in the tech industry thought that Unix could be a serious challenger to IBM's dominance of the computer field. Why was that?
Unix's Popularity in Academia
In the 1980s, Unix was widely popular in universities and research labs, similar to how Mac computers, based on a flavor of Unix, are today. This was largely historical. When interest in the system began to grow following the publishing of a journal article in "Communications of the ACM" in the 1970s, AT&T, Bell Labs' parent, was under a consent decree. The decree prevented AT&T from entering any businesses other than phone service.