I liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool.
The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it much easier to find help from other people, Makefiles that just worked, SSL accelerator boards, etc. Ask anyone that worked with zones, for example, and we find all the buzz about docker and linux containers quite funny.
I probably hated AIX the most. It was tantalizingly close to other Unix implementations, but with enough differences that things would sort-of work, but not really. To be fair, there was a "right" way to do things that worked, but I was naturally trying to use knowledge I already had. It was also the platform most likely to bomb out when trying to compile open source software. Lots of tweaking makefiles, environment variables, compiler flags, etc, to get things to work. They had a sysadmin tool called "smitty" that I particularly hated.
My early career involved compiling a lot of software that would have been better run on Linux or some BSD variant for AIX. I can confirm that building stuff like a custom Apache stack on AIX (don’t ask) was like pulling teeth using XLC.
I’m not really old enough to be an actual grey beard, but I got just enough hands-on experience with late-period Big Commercial Unix to feel like I at least swept floors and fetched coffee in the exclusive club. Cool, even if it was frustrating at times.
I guess that is the thing: we’ve settled into a monoculture that makes me deeply uncomfortable. NeXT won the desktop, but there’s only implementation. And Linux won the server. But in the meantime, I feel like only OpenBSD is credibly providing public infrastructure that everyone uses.
I kind of worry that we’re heading toward a world in which nobody really understands the guts of the systems that sit underneath modern cloud / containerized services. Furthermore, because that stuff isn’t as exciting as the Javascript framework de jure, the amount of innovation happening in the lower layers is nonexistent.
The monoculture is a good observation. Aside from the dangers you mention, the death of commercial Unix also killed off a lot of healthy competition. There used to be, for example, lots of incentive for HP, IBM, Sun, and others to tweak hardware and software to keep at the top of TPC-C benchmarks.
Edit: Well, also the security implications of the Linux/x86 monoculture.
Couldn't it be argued that a monoculture oriented around a specific architecture actually makes it easier to learn and understand the system guts, because of the stability of available learning materials and knowledge resources?
Oh, forgot to mention a funny thing about Sparc machines. It was trivially easy to accidentally halt the system by sending a break from the console. That's accidentally pressing one key on a serial console. I remember some company selling inline serial filters for $100 each.
The first day I started working for a company that had Sparc/Solaris machines around I got warned about that, and to never use the "killall" command. On linux that kills just matching processes. On Solaris that literally kills all processes.
Even though I haven't had to deal with Solaris in about a decade, and it being safe to do killall, it took me ages to break out of the habit of doing:
I've always wondered why they inclued it. There seems to be literally no uses for it, even no case where it is anything but dangerous. Even when shutting down the system, init needs to run. Can anybody enlighten me?
"killall - kill all active processes killall is used by shutdown (1M) to kill all active processes not directly related to the shutdown procedure "
So, intended for use by shutdown(1M) and nothing else. It's basically a completely different utility to the Linux one. They just happen to, unfortunately, share the same name.
Interesting. I've been an AIX dweeb since 3.2.5 and it's actually my favourite proprietary Unix mostly because it's so ornery. I still have a POWER6 running it that handles most of my web and mail tasks.
In fact, I tend to develop on it since if it works on AIX it will be portable enough to work other places. That said, I like xlc performance but I despise its weird command line options. I mostly just use gcc on AIX also.
I do prefer smit to things like HP-UX sam, but I'm accustomed to IBM overengineering. ;)
I worked for Ibm Websphere 1998-2002 in those days. I supported Aix, HP/UX, Solaris 8, and 4 rpm based Linux versions. Our job was to do nightly builds and test on each OS with DB2, Oracle etc. HP/UX and Aix were menu driven and painful for automation. Solaris was much more fun to work with. Redhat, SuSE, Yellowdog and mandrake were the linux distros. No yum to handle dependencies. I remember working on bash a lot to handle package dependencies.
One day I got an Itanium from Microsoft. It was fun to play with. Sadly I was forbidden from opening the server. It was so alpha that adjusting the clock would kill the server. It never went very far due to being so alpha.
The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it much easier to find help from other people, Makefiles that just worked, SSL accelerator boards, etc. Ask anyone that worked with zones, for example, and we find all the buzz about docker and linux containers quite funny.
I probably hated AIX the most. It was tantalizingly close to other Unix implementations, but with enough differences that things would sort-of work, but not really. To be fair, there was a "right" way to do things that worked, but I was naturally trying to use knowledge I already had. It was also the platform most likely to bomb out when trying to compile open source software. Lots of tweaking makefiles, environment variables, compiler flags, etc, to get things to work. They had a sysadmin tool called "smitty" that I particularly hated.