Still good enough to learn UNIX, that was my introduction back in 1993.
The system was still expensive enough that we had a single tower for the whole class, we would take turns into the system, having prepared our samples on MS-DOS using Turbo C, with mocks for the UNIX system calls and conditional makefiles.
Good riddance. Of all the Unix variants I tried over the years, HP-UX was the second worst (that dishonor goes to Xenix).
I remember giving a talk at Chico State University back in the dotcom era, and got a tour of the CS dept; they had various systems running on Solaris, AIX, etc, all with "normal" naming conventions. But anything with HPUX was named after diseases (e.g. Typhus, Malaria) and the feeling in the dept was not subtle.
Network effects and an as-yet insufficient friction to leave en masse has kept LI in a semi-moated space.
There have been competitors, but they are either niche (Zerply) or more regionally specific (Xing, with its focus on following EU data sovereignty laws) or the latest trend, AI-enabled agentic recruitment, which as yet has no real track record.
They didn't evolve into SF; SF was a project inside of VA that eventually became the flagship of what remained after the hardware and related services were excised. When they started (1998/99), Git wasn't a viable option (the first version of it wasn't released until 2005, by which point SF had ballooned to an enormous scale at the time, with it's own product inertia, and it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself, which is when Github started, and by then VA/SF was in decline and had changed hands several times.
> it would be a few more years before Git would become a major VCS itself
People forget that in the olden days we used Subversion and Bazaar (well, the latter if you were Canonical-adjacent), and before that CVS.
And before that, SCCS.
Going back decades, it's all people going "this sucks, I'm writing my own VCS", and for whatever reason Git was the one that gained traction in that particularly sticky and slippery swamp.
I'd love to know what the "thinking" was behind getting rid of the hardware business. We bought some Penguin Computing servers after VA left the market.
1. I have some serious biases against Penguin at the time (for...reasons) and frankly was never impressed with their product.
2. Without getting into a bunch of weird minutiae, we got big enough to be a threat to people who could afford to bleed us; case in point, we started doing incredibly well in HPC clusters, and big vendors like IBM and Dell started to offer severely below cost hardware packaged with their full services that completely undercut a business that already had thin margins.
IMHO, we made better gear at the time, but we were not in a market as wide and deep for linux optimized machines as it is now. It's not an unusual story in the valley. We did have a deep talent bench that ended up in key roles in a bunch of firms that are doing well: Google, Apple, et al.
Some people can make a living doing something they enjoy. "Success" is not fame, and vice versa (they are wholly orthogonal to each other), and I remember reading an interview with a member of Canadian group Saga, who in the US had like 1 top 40 hit in the early 80s and a few more minor ones in their home country, but ultimately they sell a few thousand records a year, and tour regularly in two "big" markets for them : Puerto Rico and Germany, and they seem to make roughly a middle class lifestyle doing so.
Beats being an accountant or urologist I suppose.
I suspect there's a similar vibe for cover band folks.
