In the late 80s, I used Ultrix, on VAXes and DECstations (MIPS CPUs). Worked excellently. Never had to deal with support, nor did I administer the system.
In the 90s, I had a NeXT on my desk, and roughly half my department used NeXT machines (we had about 30 in the department). This was a bizarre experience. On one hand, they were delightful to use, and just worked, and were intuitive. It is very clear where today's MacOS gets is "user-friendly" and "must be perfect" mindset from. The GUI was fabulous, and most of the time the user interface was great. But, there were two problems. First, the development environment was busted beyond belief. If you wanted to code on it, Objective C worked great; all other languages (Fortran, C, Perl, REXX, C++) had broken libraries, ancient compiler versions, bugs up the wazoo. Because of that, I used my NeXT in a nutshell as a multi-window terminal emulator, and did my real work on big AIX machines in the computer center, on VAXes running VMS, and on mainframes running VM. Unfortunately, for GUI work I had to use the NeXT natively. And this is the point where I went from frustrated to angry: I had to use an Xwindows based data analysis application, and discovered so many bugs in the NeXT implementation of X that the apps were fundamentally unusable. For example: If you draw a line, it is drawn on the correct pixels on the screen; if you draw a point (single pixel), it is drawn 8 pixels to the left where it belongs. When you are trying to match measured data points on a graph to an interpolation line, and all the data points are 8 pixels to the left, this gets to be insane. Support from NeXT was non-existing, no answers were ever forthcoming, even though our organization was the largest NeXT customer in the world. Interesting tidbit: The first HTTP web server outside of CERN, the first one in the US, and the second web server in the world, ran on a NeXT cube, in an office about 50 feet down the hallway from me. The final straw was the following: I was using a complex and expensive simulation and programming package (ModSim from CACI, a Modula-3 compiler with built-in simulation framework) on my NeXT; the license for that cost several $10K. At some point, ModSim sales called me, asking to please stop using the license, since I was the last customer in the world still using ModSim on a NeXT; the had just talked the next-to-last customer out of using a NeXT (the next-to-last customer was the CIA, ModSim was mostly sold into federal government agencies). I used that an an excuse to throw the next in the trash, and I replaced it with ... drum roll ... a non-GUI machine: I connected a multi-port VT200 terminal to my office mate's RS6000. Literally, compared to a NeXT on my desk, not having a GUI was an advantage. CACI was kind enough to transfer my ModSim license to an RS-6000 server.
At the same time, I started using AIX as a user; it was annoying, painful, and IBM is a very obnoxious company (more on that below). Having to use SMIT to administer things was awful. But, after a while you figure out that AIX is actually great: Everything just bloody works, and once you get over the allergic reaction to things having been IBMized, and gritting your teeth about the fact that SMIT has to use IBM language to describe common things, the machines are actually exceedingly productive. I started administering several AIX machines, and working with IBM support was an absolute pleasure: something goes wrong, you call 1-800-IBM-SERV, enter your ID number, and about an hour later you have a competent engineer on the phone who helps you solve your problem. The best part about AIX was: It ran on really fast hardware; the RS-6000 CPUs were among the fasted number crunchers we had available. We actually had a joke about it: When IBM looked for a successor the PC (which stands for piece of crap), they built the PS2, which means "piece of shit too". But then they improved it, first to the RT, and then to the RS-6000, which means "rapid shit". Sure, AIX was a weird critter, but it ran like a bat out of hell, it was really reliable, and things just bloody worked.
After that experience, I spent 4 years mostly using Windows machines professionally, but we also have a few SVR4 machines running on i386 hardware (and when I say 386, I do mean Intel 386, 486 and Pentium). I don't even remember which vendor we got our SVR4 from, but it was boring. Just Unix, without a GUI. Worked perfectly.
I then spent two years employed by HP, with a HP-UX machine on my desk, and a Windows laptop. The HP-UX machine was also completely boring and perfect; I used Motif under X for a desktop (mail and web browser), and otherwise mostly shell work. Lots of development in languages such as C++, Tcl and others. Given that I was inside HP (matter-of-fact, in HP's building 1, the same building where Mr. Hewlett's and Mr. Packard's offices were), there as no system administration to be done, we had a competent set of professional admins. HP's compiler was extremely good; some colleagues tried to use gcc, and were always amazed at what a complete piece of crap gcc was.
I then went and worked for IBM for nearly two decades. During that time I used AIX, but my personal desktop and laptop machines were either Linux, and then Windows after I got tired of how flaky Linux was. Eventually, I replaced my desktop/laptop with MacOS. For servers, AIX was again boring and perfect. Installing and administering AIX using SMIT required intestinal fortitude (because everything was so weird), but once you get over that, it just works, exceedingly well. Again, IBM's compilers (XLC and XLF) were leagues better than anything available on Linux, or gcc on AIX. It's hard to comment on the quality of support, because on one hand IBM's internal systems didn't get any formal support (we weren't allowed to call 1-800-IBM-SERV, and PhD researchers had to be their own sys admins), but on the other hand, we knew the phone numbers for developers, so if we needed help, we just talked to engineering directly.
One of my colleagues had to get a mainframe running, and our group was too small to buy the hardware (even within IBM, a million-dollar mainframe is not easily available). So they installed the Hercules emulator on an AIX machine, and then booted that into both VM and zOS. Yes, AIX was good enough, you could use it to host a mainframe OS, and get productive work done. He was amazed when he had to perform zOS system administration by writing JCL decks (80-column card images with // JOB in front!), but it all worked.
I left IBM in 2017, and since then I have not logged into anything other than MacOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD.
I had colleagues that used Sun machines, with both Solaris and SunOS. They didn't like it. My wife used SGIs with Irix and VAXes with VMS, and it was easy and productive, but she's not a computer person (she just owned and administered her own machines, sometimes a half dozen of them).
So here is my summary of using commercial Unixes:
- Ultrix, AIX and HP-UX were all great, productive, superb support, fast, efficient. That was from roughly 1988 to about 2015. Irix I only know about second hand, and it was similarly good.
- SVR4 on Intel hardware in the 1990s just worked, and was boring.
- NeXT's version of Unix was a disaster, more bugs than a mangy dog. Yet it was genius, with the first really good GUI, sort of the bridge between Xerox' Alto and today's Mac.
- VMS was and remains the best commercial operating system ever. Sadly, it is today a heritage niche.
- Until about 2002 or 2005, Linux was a toy, which hobbyists were able to use for a single desktop/GUI system, or for one-off servers. If you had the $$$ to get a commercial Unix license, it was massively better than Linux. At some point, Linux grew up to become a really good server OS, and it remained free (or very cheap, if you buy support from RH or SUSE), which destroyed the commercial Unix market.
- For my personal servers, I have very intentionally chosen to use OpenBSD (since ~2002 until about 2011 or 2014) and FreeBSD since. Because it is just a more pleasant experience than Linux, the only other realistic alternative.
It was the early days of grabbing gcc et al over FTP.
) to learn basics about Unix. Also I had (at that time still commercial) Minix on Atari ST. Back then I was spending most of my learning time on DEC VMS. Only since 2001 I started with Linux, then from ’06 FreeBSD and since totally lost interest in any commercial Unix variant, including OS X.
Which software run on Sun servers and SGI WS? Did SGI maybe run Linotype-Hell DaVinci? AFAIR SGI was huge improvement and much smaller and cheaper than previously used Linotype-Hell LinoServer beasts (their size was comparable with AS/400 B20-B40 models)
