[ibiza]

I wonder if a Sun, Dec, or HP of the 90s would have had a fighting chance against Windows NT had they not embraced X, and instead developed a local-first stack optimized for their considerable hardware.

Related, I've always found it odd that in Linus' history of Linux, part of it was a desire to implement an Amiga-like OS on a PC. This is the message-passing-bad guy. What happened?

[hagbard_c]

XFree86 happened, it was an easy port to Linux and opened up a world of X11 software. The 'win' of Windows was not due to the adoption of X11 but due to the fact that it ran on all those clones out there while the Unix vendors were busily fighting their own turf wars - the 'Unix wars' [1]. Microsoft's underhanded tactics were another part of securing their 'victory', this was back in the time when manufacturers would loose their Windows licence if they dared to offer any alternative choice besides what MS had to offer. No Windows licence may not have been a problem for a company like Sun or Silicon Graphics but it did keep 'clones' vendors from straying.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars