Before Linux, there was Unix. It was great, but it was and has been plagued by problems with licensing and proprietary competition. [Vintage Appartus] recalls, for example, the AT&T Unix PC from the 1980s. It was awesome, but you’ve probably never heard of it. For 1985, it was a nice setup. You got a 10 MHz Motorola 68010, 512K of RAM (but upgradable to 4M), a floppy, a modem, a 720×384 monochrome screen, and a 10 or 20 MB hard drive. You can check out the video explaining the machine and its problems below.Physically, the computer looked like a high-end Apple ][ with a removable keyboard and a built-in monitor. Expansion was via three slots. Cold start took about three minutes, and then you have a fairly normal Unix setup for the period.The sample machine uses a disk emulator, so the video shows the computer running much faster than it would with a real period hard drive. The card also has an 8086 expansion board that can boot MSDOS, an important feature in 1985.We’d like to see inside the box. Why did it fail? The video says it was very slow and since Unix does more than DOS, it was perceived as very slow compared to an IBM PC. This was made worse by a very slow hard drive that was prone to failure. The price didn’t help. Apparently, the list price at introduction was $15,000. A comparable IBM AT was around half of that. To make the machine really usable, you’d have to throw even more money at it.While 1985-era Unix isn’t as nice as what we have today, if you spent time on older versions, you’d appreciate what it does do. Unix workstations did have their day, and they were great. But your desktop will probably run circles around even the best of them today.