Re:The Colonial Pipeline Was Fine, Shutdown to Make Sure Its...
by daniellarusso on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @07:03AM
(#27193165)
Anecdotal, but working in retail in the 90s, the backend system was some *nix server, the wireless Telxon guns ran DOS 3.2, and there was a dedicated OS/2 Warp desktop that would perform reporting and aggregate data.
I am not sure what the registers ran, but they were IBM, all text-based.
Also, I remember my friend was a manager at AMC theatres at the time, and their system was entirely text-based. I remember watching him run end-of-day reports and you could see it zip up the files and hear the modem dial out and connect to corporate.
Re:The Colonial Pipeline Was Fine, Shutdown to Make Sure Its...
by Stranger43 on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @07:35AM
(#27193370)
Dont make the mistake of thinking that the crap that was the pure gnu toolchain was in any way equal to what was available for those who could afford to run commercial unix(tm), it was an completely different world that Linux would not catch up to until the 00's mostly by absorbing frameworks and software from the world of commercial unix(tm) and from more recent developments.
I dont think i can recall any commercial Unix even shipping gcc back in the day.
*nix OSes may have been as far superior to Windows as you can imagine, but the development ecosystem certainly wasn't. There were Delphi, VB and other RAD tools for Windows, with tons of GUI and general purpose libraries and toolkits. Bun on *nix you basically had just GCC and vim/emacs. There were no GitHub, no npm, no AWS, nothing. If you'd compare TCO of an enterprise app plus necessary infrastructure, the Windows-flavored one would come a clear winner. Even mixed environments were too much of a hassle, due to poor interoperability.