Unix Turns 40

Here’s a great article about Unix turning 40 years old. The article takes you back to late 60’s when Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie joined Bell Labs to its current state where three manufaturers dominate the Unix world of HP-UX, Solaris and AIX.

Many of us still remember that Byte Magazine article in 1990 that wondered “Is UNIX dead?” The timing was around the impending release of Windows NT®. Twenty years later, most IT directors would rather chew on glass than run their mission-critical applications on Windows servers. What is it about UNIX that keeps it going?

By the way, Unix still has a great future.

The UNIX market exhibited strong growth quarter over quarter with a revenue increase of 30.4% ($3,741M to $4,877M) and a unit increase of 8.3% (114,845 to 124,346). UNIX was the largest OS segment by revenue last quarter, eclipsing Windows, which slipped to #2. Also on the processor front RISC systems themselves saw a 32.7% increase in revenue and a 15.3% increase in units shipped.