> RedHat moved into that space by providing businesses the same model of support
But it didn't, not back then. In the 1990s, and for most of the company's first decade in business, it offered a free distribution and made most of its money from selling merchandise. Which is to say, not very much money at all.
It's only around 2003 but its management hit upon the idea of having a premium enterprise distribution, and making the only way to obtain it being to buy commercial support for it. That was a stroke of genius, and over the last 20 years, it's made the company very rich indeed — in stark contrast to its first decade.
> while ALSO having a desktop version/free version for people to learn on.
Again, that split only came after about a decade in business. For its first 10 years or so, there was only the free version.
Also, more to the point, back when Solaris and HP UX were big, Red Hat was still very small and mainly in the business of selling T-shirts and mouse mats.
It's a bit of a generalisation, but to an extent, it was Microsoft Windows which put commercial UNIX out of business, followed by Apple macOS which showed that UNIX on the desktop could be as good or better than Windows.
Windows established a marketplace of COTS high-end x86 kit with decent graphics capabilities and capable storage subsystems. Apple successfully piggybacked on that to make desirable easy to use RISC UNIX workstations for consumers, using their own processors but otherwise pretty much off the shelf PC industry parts.
And those things put together are what created a marketplace in which Linux could thrive and compete effectively.
When Linux was first invented, a high end PC had a crappy VGA card on the ISA bus, and many of them didn't even have mice, sound or networking as standard. I was there. It was grim.
> It's only around 2003 but its management hit upon the idea of having a premium enterprise distribution, and making the only way to obtain it being to buy commercial support for it. That was a stroke of genius, and over the last 20 years, it's made the company very rich indeed — in stark contrast to its first decade.
Their enterprise support started around RH6, which was in 1999 and grew from there. It eventually morphed into RHEL because of the enterprise success, but didn't start with it.
Yes, Wintel was huge for desktops, but not for high powered engineering software like EDA tools, modeling, simulation, etc. (I think AutoCAD was the only Windows software that real engineers used).
MacOS wasn't UNIX based until the big MacOS X rewrite which was around 1999, if I remember right. It felt very much like it was a reaction to Linux, especially with them making a big deal about how it was an Official UNIX(TM), not so subtly reminding us that Linux was not.
OSX wasn't a rewrite of MacOS. It was a new chrome over top of NeXTStep, which was BSD on Mach (or Mach in BSD). It wasn't a reaction to anything, it was Steve Jobs bringing NeXT in to give Apple a real OS.
What really killed Unix on workstations was NT, and it killed it when the first sgi NT workstations shipped.
In the server space, Linux began to replace Solaris once you could run Oracle on Linux. That was the end of every other Unix.
> OSX wasn't a rewrite of MacOS. It was a new chrome over top of NeXTStep
In addition major new chrome (Cocoa, OS X Finder, etc.) Mac OS X originally included a version of the older Mac OS APIs (Carbon) as well as a Mac OS 9 virtual environment (Classic) for running older non-Carbon apps. It was really a chimera that included pretty complete Mac OS 9 ABI support as well as a Mac-flavored version of NeXTSTEP.
It's a bit of a shame that Apple keeps abandoning its backward compatibility layers (I hope Rosetta2 will be different) but I guess that's what emulators are for.
1993... I bought a 486-dx2/66 with VESA Local Bus graphics, 1024x768 monitor with mouse and sound card. At first I ran OS/2 and later Yggdrasil Linux I think.
But it didn't, not back then. In the 1990s, and for most of the company's first decade in business, it offered a free distribution and made most of its money from selling merchandise. Which is to say, not very much money at all.
It's only around 2003 but its management hit upon the idea of having a premium enterprise distribution, and making the only way to obtain it being to buy commercial support for it. That was a stroke of genius, and over the last 20 years, it's made the company very rich indeed — in stark contrast to its first decade.
> while ALSO having a desktop version/free version for people to learn on.
Again, that split only came after about a decade in business. For its first 10 years or so, there was only the free version.
Also, more to the point, back when Solaris and HP UX were big, Red Hat was still very small and mainly in the business of selling T-shirts and mouse mats.
It's a bit of a generalisation, but to an extent, it was Microsoft Windows which put commercial UNIX out of business, followed by Apple macOS which showed that UNIX on the desktop could be as good or better than Windows.
Windows established a marketplace of COTS high-end x86 kit with decent graphics capabilities and capable storage subsystems. Apple successfully piggybacked on that to make desirable easy to use RISC UNIX workstations for consumers, using their own processors but otherwise pretty much off the shelf PC industry parts.
And those things put together are what created a marketplace in which Linux could thrive and compete effectively.
When Linux was first invented, a high end PC had a crappy VGA card on the ISA bus, and many of them didn't even have mice, sound or networking as standard. I was there. It was grim.