How Unix made it to the top
Wow. I have to say that it is funny how you hear the legendary tales of computing history over and over again and then some little crucial minor details like "we sold the CEO's office on it" eventually slip out.<p>Ok, that was important at AT&T, but not really why Unix currently rules the universe. Due to anti-trust settlements and cheap licensing, and copyright foibles, Unix was the cheap midrange choice for students and non-enterprise users. After a lot of pain, Unix eventually evolved into an "open standard". And that eventually evolved into an "open source" standard with Linux (and BSD, MacOS, etc.) To quote DEC's Ken Olsen[1]:<p>> <i>[UNIX is] great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it’s great for interchanging programs between different machines. ... It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They’ll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.</i><p>And that is why your cell phone runs Unix and not VMS.<p>[1] <a href="http://sinix.org/blog/?p=16" rel="nofollow">http://sinix.org/blog/?p=16</a>