The years from 1989 to 1993 were the darkest in Unix's history. It appeared then that all the Unix community's dreams had failed. Internecine warfare had reduced the proprietary Unix industry to a squabbling shambles that never summoned either the determination or the capability to challenge Microsoft. The elegant Motorola chips favored by most Unix programmers had lost out to Intel's ugly but inexpensive processors. The GNU project failed to produce the free Unix kernel it had been promising since 1985, and after years of excuses its credibility was beginning to wear thin. PC technology was being relentlessly corporatized. The pioneering Unix hackers of the 1970s were hitting middle age and slowing down. Hardware was getting cheaper, but Unix was still too expensive. We were belatedly becoming aware that the old monopoly of IBM had yielded to a newer monopoly of Microsoft, and Microsoft's mal-engineered software was rising around us like a tide of sewage
This was found here in the The Art of Unix Programming
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