it was about this time.. on a dark and stormy day

I think the year was 1993 and it was around this time of year. It was bitterly cold outside, that much I do remember, but then again I was a youngster back then and cold affected me in greater ways than it does today. I was working at then Glaxo, a pharmaceutical company, in RTP, North Carolina and I had just be introduced to a old-school operating system called UNIX.

Personal computers back then were running DOS with Windows 3.1 on top. It's hard to remember back in the day that the Microsoft GUI ran on top of a separate operating system, and no necessarily one made by Microsoft. IBM, DR and a host of other companies had their own versions of DOS and a computer could be running any kind of DOS. IBM had a little thing called OS/2 2.0 but in 1993 OS/2 was, shall we say, rough around the edges? It ran circles around DOS/Windows, that much was totally clear, but it lacked a bit of polish that would come later in OS/2 3.0 and later Warp. But that is future speak back in '93.

At a large company you might find some Macs in the marketing department, perhaps elsewhere. In the data center you might find a VAX, probably for the R&D side of the house. Perhaps an IBM mainframe was around too. But lurking back there was UNIX. Perhaps it was just a mail server or something else, or maybe you had some mid-range UNIX systems even big ones the size of, oh, I don't know, a full-sized Ford van? Sun Microsystems was a player back then and so was HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics, and many others that made their own versions of UNIX. UNIX was created at Bell Labs in 1969 and it gained a foothold that it has yet to lose today.

UNIX was strange and foreign to me. There was an odd grapihcal interface called "X Windows" and a command line interface that was at first quite baffeling (though in starting to poke around the command line I could clearly see the influce of UNIX on DOS as serveral, if not many, of the commands were the same, though the guts of the OS couldn't be more different).

Back to that cold, blustery day. I had an application on a UNIX machine that was located in the R&D campus and I was on the commerical campus. We were connected by, at the time, blistering fast 100 megabit FDDI rings and the computers were plugged into shared 10 meg hugs. Laughable today, but fairly state of the art back then.

So, here I was. I needed to launch an application on a machine located on a differnet campus and I had resolved myself to get out in the cold, walk over, sit down in front of the other UNIX machine, and do the work that needed doing.

Not so fast! In walks one of the more senior UNIX gurus and he says "just set your display varialbe and bring the GUI app up on your desktop." I thought that was the craziest thing I'd ever heard. Launch an app on a remote machine and use the app on my local machine? I logged in (telnet back in those days) issued my 'setenv DISPLAY=my.ipaddress.blah' and proceeded to launch the app. A few seconds later there it appeared on my machine as if magic.

Had this been a slight-of-hand magic trick it would have been one of the best I have ever seen. I wondered then why and how could an "old" operating system have functionality that copycat desktop operation systems couldn't dream of. The root/superuser account was a neat trick too - keeping the operating system delicate parts away from the user so the user (or in the future, a virus) couldn't do accidental damage was pretty neat too.

Even today, using a XP machine (I don't have a Vista machine and probably never will.. work will likely skip Vista and go straight to 7), I wonder why things are so.. "primitive". I love my Mac, my personal computing platform outside of work, and there is far greater amount of spit and polish on the Mac OS compared to Windows, and in some ways Linux and UNIX. Yes, there are features of Linux and UNIX that I think are lacking in OS X but OS X is one heck of a tightly integrated OS. It's easy to use and the power is still there in the background in you want to use it. If you don't that's ok too. You can still do things with a Mac you can't do with a PC running Windows. The reverse is true I'm sure but I can't think of an example.

Still, UNIX is one heck of an operating system. It can run on little systems and it can scale to run on very large systems. Wonderful stuff. I hope UNIX never dies even though eventually I think Linux is going to totally take over that market space. When that day comes I'll smile a bit, afterall any time a community driven effort of any kind can reach such measured success is wonderful. But good, old UNIX will always be just that. Good stuff.