88K DG/UX didn't last very long before they switched to x86, which we also had. Under my desk I had Motorola's 88110 system (a stackable with a SCSI floppy disk!) The thing that stood out most about DG was just how nice all their staff were. I mean really nice.
Even in those days it became very apparent that whatever workstations developers worked on were what was then best supported in the products even for non-GUI software. Slowly but surely the workstation vendors dropped support to server only, meanwhile Windows spread from workstations to servers even though it was considered inferior. Linux also spread for the same reasons.
The DG gear was awesome, the OS was great and even the support was terrific. Such a shame they died.
I never considered the rise of Windows as a development platform as being the driver for that failure but it makes sense. I used to work on X terminals and then Linux workstations, and with DG being strongly into GNU tools I didn’t see the Windows side of things at all until much later in my career.
But this really supports up the idea that if devs move to ARM, so will the cloud.
We used IBM X Windows terminals, and green phosphor text ones to connect to them.
By the time I graduated, they had been replaced by Red-Hat Linux.
But things are a bit different now, it’s much more convenient to work on a laptop, so most people do that. Maybe the pendulum will swing the other way and we’ll start timesharing again, with laptops as terminals instead of standalone machines, but even if that’s possible in theory, there are few providers of ARM in the cloud at the moment. It’s a chicken and egg problem and I think Linus is right, it’s going to take pressure from devs, most of whom IMO don’t care enough to make a difference.
The tipping point will be when deploying to x86 becomes annoying (for some measure of annoying). Right now, even though I’d personally like to deploy to ARM (or at least give it a red hot go), my cloud provider (Vultr) doesn’t support it yet, and I don’t personally plan to go ARM on my desktop until next year. But I’m a CPU enthusiast. Most people wouldn’t bother to go the the extra effort.