Remembering The 1984 Unix PC. Why Did It Fail So Hard?
- Reference: 0182960698
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/04/26/2038235/remembering-the-1984-unix-pc-why-did-it-fail-so-hard
- Source link:
> I was super-active in the Unix-PC Usenet groups back in the 90s... We hacked the hell out of them. They were small, sexy, and... they ran Unix!
>
> Unfortunately, they were a commercial failure. There were so many things wrong with them — not just stuff that broke, but the baseline configuration was nigh on worthless. I recently was able to get another machine and got it up and running (with a few hiccups). I whipped up a [3]video showing all the cool things it can do , but also running through what went wrong and why it ultimately failed.
The video shows the ancient green-on-black screen of 1984's AT&T Unix PC (with the OS running on a silicon drive emulation). The original machine had 512K of memory and a 10-megabyte hard drive described as slow, failure-prone, and noisy . There's also a drive for inserting floppy disks, and a separate MS-DOS board (with its own CPU) that could be plugged into the expansion slot — but the device was "remarkably heavy," weighing in aqt 40 pounds
See the strange 1984 mouse, and its keyboard with both a Return key and a separate Enter key. There's even plug-in ports for phone landlines. "It looked great," Shayde says in the video, showing off its Spirograph demo and '80s-era games like Pong, Conway's Game of Life, [4]GNU Chess , "Trk", and NetHack. But besides slow startup times, it was expensive — in today's dollars, it would've cost roughly $15,000 — and suffered from Unix's lack of spreadsheets, word processing software and other office productivity tools at the time. At that price the Unix PCs couldn't compete with IBM's home computers and their desktop applications. "It just didn't have the resources, the software, the capabilities and the price point that made it attractive."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_UNIX_PC
[2] https://www.slashdot.org/~Shayde
[3] https://youtu.be/_x3uxKfFI-0
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Chess
I'll Tell You Why (Score:3)
There were two primary reasons why it failed.
1. Price. It cost a frigging fortune!
2a. No off the shelf software. At its price point the only "people" buying these were businesses and granted researchers. But, there was no off the shelf or precompiled business software for it to be useful.
2b. You had to write your own software. Even if you bought software or had a developer write it for you, you then had to compile it to run on this box. There were only a select few with the knowledge, time, and patience to compile their own shit on that oversized calculator.
I enjoyed the video (Score:2)
I was around back in that era, but if I was aware of these the impression didn't stick.
Watching, I was struck by the (manufacturer's) decision to have the display physically affixed to (a raised post on?) the chassis of the computer. It seems like a potential point of failure, especially given the not-insignificant weight of even a smallish CRT - plus it would just make things more awkward when you needed to move the machine or get inside it. Anyone know if it was simple - or possible - to detach?
Re: (Score:2)
Up until the mid '90s, most computers were made to have a CRT monitor sit on top of it. I don't think that was a problem.
I used to lug CRT monitors to LAN parties back in the 90s... It was just the way we did it back then.
The mouse here was a common design from Mouse Systems, who also made the same model adapted to the IBM PC and for several other Unix vendors.
The short answer (Score:3)
Computers were large, expensive, unable to interface, and impractical. The attitude at the time was, "id rather just have a typewriter" which honestly was still a luxury. If you wanted to game, you were better off buying a console. If you were writing, a typewriter with error correction paper was the way to go. Data processing was done with a calculator and spreadsheets were done by hand.
Related movie trivia (Score:2)
In the Sylvester Stallone movie "Cobra", there are two types of computers seen. In his apartment, there's a PC clone. In the police station, there are more PC clones but also a bunch of these AT&T Unix PC machines.
The only ones operating are the PC clones, whose vendor provided people. The provider of the AT&T machines provided nobody, and no information on how to run them. They looked super-cool for their day. During down-time, people switched them on, thought they were interesting, and then ignore
For Comparison (Score:2)
Comparing the 7300 with the IBM XT and IBM AT:
Type IBM P/N Date ann Date w/dn Bus Slots Bays Processor MHz BaseRAM MaxRAM FDD HDD
XT 5160-087 March 1983 June 1984 ISA, 8-bit 8 2 Intel 8088 4.77 128 KB
Easy - Cost (Score:1)
When the average new car pricing between 10k+ in 1984, and this could top out at 15k+ ... it's easy to see why it failed, you had cheaper options available for the home pc at the time.
Similarly expensive ... (Score:2)
I never worked with one of those AT&T Unix PCs, but had a Sun386i on my desk for a while, on loan from a customer -- we offered a large discount on the software support contract if the customer loaned us one of their systems for support and development. We added an expansion storage case (that attached on top) with a (I think) 500MB SCSI disk, that was physically huge by today's standards - it had 8 platters and was almost the size of a shoe box. I later used that disk on my BSD/386 system, then disa
It was price (Score:4, Informative)
You could get an IBM PC clone and put Xenix on it for a fraction of the price. There were plenty of nerds who wanted Unix, it was always hyped up as the next big thing, but nobody wanted to spend that much.
And why did Xenix tank? Because Xenix was also expensive. Around a thousand dollars for the base system which didn't even include a C compiler.
It wasn't until MINIX came out, and Coherent dropped in price, that Unix-on-a-commodity-system became practical. And even then, it took Linux and the various GNU distributions to actually become a well supported, common enough, OS for it to gain traction outside of neckbeards.