Basically the title
You should go read Microsoft’s attempt at excluding Linux/Unix from running on x86 using ACPI!
https://web.archive.org/web/20070202174648/http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf
Btw, in the end, they did this with their office format.
Browser too, and the whole activeX, and DirectX api system to practically force windows only development.
Yeah, same with gaming until Proton came along
for the millionth time they get to stand on the shoulders on all the wine development that came before it. and now we have to reckon with the bullshit of proton patches that never go upstream to make wine better for all
Criticism may be justified, but without Proton, how far would wine have come? Without Steamdeck + proton, gaming would still be a no-go for linux and absolutely not worth mentioning. So fewer users would have switched to linux.
OK let go back and bring wine forward … Maybe it will be something in 10-20 years ( well for released titles and not future Titels.)
all I’m saying is, it sucks that this shit isn’t upstream
Tbf if wine were released under regular GNU instead of LGPL, Valve wouldn’t have been able to make Proton proprietary, and so their contributions would also be open source. It is unfortunate that this is the situation, but by using the LGPL license WINE basically permitted this, no?
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:O The Archive! It’s back online!! WOOOOO
Unix also including mac and bsds?
BSDs mostly, Mac wasn’t a Unix based system at the time. It also didn’t run on x86.
@wildbus8979 @Mwa MacOS was Unix based after Steve Jobs created the Mach/Unix/Mac Finder stack for use on the Next computer, as soon as he returned to Apple, it was adopted there.
I know. At the time of the ACPI debacle, Mac OS X didn’t exist yet, and NeXT was essentially irrelevant because a) it didn’t run x86 and b) it only ran on proprietary hardware.
@wildbus8979 Actually, because it used a Mach microkernel, it could easily be ported to ANY hardware, that is the whole entire point of Mach. Also it did run on the Mc680x0 family and that was what Mac was based upon at the time, prior to Power PC chips, prior to Intel, prior to M chips, and it is precisely that Mach microkernel that enabled the easy transition from one hardware platform to the next.
Yes but that’s completely irrelevant to the original point.
@wildbus8979 No but completely relevant to your comment. Such is the nature of conversational threads.
The 90’s? Locked bootloaders would’ve meant people woukdve simply bought different machines without a locked bootloader.
See the IBM/Phoenix BIOS war - it’s essentially the same thing. IBM didn’t want to license their BIOS to everyone, so Phoenix reverse engineered it. If I remember right, IBM was trying to lock everyone to using their OS.
This! Manufacturers were trying to lock people into their systems, just by different means. Reverse engineering a piece of low-level software (BIOS) so that you could run high-level software written for that machine architecture on different hardware was the main battle of the day.
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Made me think of the first season of Halt and Catch Fire.
Valid question. You can ask this about many things:
Would the Internet as we know it exist if Facebook, AOL, and Yahoo had united to create a walled garden?
Would Macbooks as we know them today exist without an open source ecosystem? Would the company Appke exist? Would there be an iPhone?
Would the web exist without Linux? Both developed at the same time, 1991 till now, and most stuff runs on Linux servers.
Would the people who build all the hardware and software even be interested in computers had they not played with (build) computers in the 90ies? What if we had given them an iPad aith CandyCrush that just works; and not BIOS codes, cables, extension cards and drivers?
What if we had given them an iPad aith CandyCrush that just works
We’ll know the answer in just a few more years here. Whole generation growing up that way currently.
On the “web without Linux”, I imagine it probably would have been scattered across a few proprietary Nixes until FreeBSD emerged from the AT&T lawsuit, upon which FreeBSD would have become the dominant web server.
Things just weren’t like that then. Otherwise all PC peripherals would be locked down too, so no device drivers. That was already a problem with cheap windows crap. But the better stuff was documented.
Maybe there would be no Linux but that isn’t as bad as it sounds, since BSD Unix was being pried loose at the time, plus there were other kernels that had potential. And the consumer PCs we use now weren’t really foreseen. We expected to run on workstation class hardware that was more serious (though more expensive) than PCs were at the time. They would have stayed less locked down.
I think you’re forgetting where Linux was the most successful by far: Servers and Android. Server guys do what they want, if you tell them they can only use software you allow them to, they will laugh at you and buy their data center elsewhere. Android has had locked bootloaders forever (I actually think even my very first phone had one).
So maybe development would have been harder? I mean, we don’t have looked bootloaders on desktop even today, not really locked at least, so it’s hard to tell. Linux’s main audience would not have cared I think.
Early Android (circa 2009) didn’t have locked bootloaders.
Google wanted people to experiment, which was basically free research for them. Pixel’s today are unlocked when purchased from Google.
Even my earliest Verizon phones weren’t bootloader locked - they didn’t start doing that for a few years (my last Verizon phone in 2012 wasn’t bootloader locked). And Verizon is arguably the worst vendor when it comes to bootloader locked phones.
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What? At least two years ago, all had locked bootloaders and half of the vendors wouldn’t let you unlock it. “Here” being central europe.
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Mean, so it’s a regional thing. But why do they lock in US and Europe?
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Seconding that’s a not-how-things-were.
The lovely thing with legacy architectures (6502, 68k, x86, z80, etc.) that were in use during that time is that they were very very simple: all you needed to do was put executable code on a ROM at the correct memory address, and the system would boot it.
There wasn’t anything required other than making sure the code was where the CPU would go looking for it, and then it’d handle it from there.
Sure, booting an OS meant that you needed whatever booted the CPU to then chain into the OS bootloader and provide all the things the OS was expecting (BIOS functions, etc.) but the actual bootstrap from ‘off’ to ‘running code’ was literally just an EPROM burner away.
It’s a lot more complicated now, but users would, for the most part, not tolerate removing the ability to boot any OS they feel like, so there’s enough pressure that locked shit won’t migrate down to all consumer hardware.
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competition in the x86 OS space back then
Oh yeah: there were a stuuuupid amount of OSes.
On the DOS side you had MS, IBM, and Digital Research.
You also had a bunch of commercial UNIXes: NextStep, Solaris, Xenix/SCO, etc. along with Linux and a variety of BSDs. There were also a ton of Sys4/5 implementations that were single-vendor specific so they could sell their hardware (which was x86 and not something more exotic) that have vanished to time because that business model only worked for a couple of years, if that.
There was of course two different Windows (NT, 9x), OS/2 which of course could also run (some) Windows apps, and a whole host of oddballs like QNX and BeOS and Plan9 or even CP/M86.
It was a lot less of a stodgy Linux-or-Windows monoculture, and I miss it.
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…I still have some OS/2 (or, rather, ArcaOS) systems running here.
Mostly for a very limited subset of things that never really migrated across to “modern” windows - I have a BBS running on there because 16 bit DOS apps on OS/2 was pretty much the best way to run them when it was 1994, and in 2024 it’s still the best way to deal with them.
but users would, for the most part, not tolerate removing the ability to boot any OS they feel like, so there’s enough pressure that locked shit won’t migrate down to all consumer hardware.
what makes you think that?
The same reason people who drive 20 miles a day have worries about range on an EV that’ll do 300, or why people espouse the freedom of Android but then use the default Google apps.
People like the option of choice, even if they’re not necessarily ever going to engage in making a different one.
If there are two options for a computer, one is “will run everything” and the other is “will only run Windows” a good portion of people are still going to pick the first, even though very few of them will ever do anything else, simply because people really really like having the option of choice.
I don’t think they even know that there’s a possible choice. Common people don’t understand computers, not at this level.
Cars is a good example for another reason. Do we have new cars without a built-in internet connection and continuous user (and environment) tracking, and questionable remote control functions? Afaik we don’t.
