I have been searching for, and failing to find a quote by Steve Jobs - I remember reading it in the late 80s. It was to the effect "UNIX is going to be the operating system for the 90's". I'd love to track down the original source for this...

There was ad by NeXT -- "In the 90's we'll probably see only ten real breakthroughs in computers. Here are seven of them." that lists making Unix usable as one of them. I have this poster framed in my office.

A copy and someones review of those seven here: http://wemmick.net/writings/next-predictions/

Optical storage maybe not. But others like Unix, multimedia email and "programmer productivity" faired fairly well.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if he'd said that; but you might be thinking of Gates who once said that OS/2 would be the operating system of the '90s. (He was wrong but he… still did all right in the end.)

It was MS themselves that turned the OS/2 2.0 project into an entire fiasco: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-...

I'm willing to give his prediction some credit. Windows and OS/2 are pretty closely related.

Excellent point. Ignoring marketing labels, his statement was as true as can be.

The Windows that is related to OS/2 is NT, which was very much not the operating system of the 90's, since it didn't go mainstream until NT5.x: Windows 2000 and Windows XP.