> wonder if we can do better today
Cough... systems... cough...
We can do better. Plan 9 existed. Apple's Newton has a unique take on data files. AS/400's map all storage to memory addresses giving a single address space for everything. With Smalltalk, applications would just be new classes you import into your system.
The key to Unix's success seems to be not doing better, but doing as little as possible while still remaining useful.
And yes, it's a bit disappointing that, when we did better, we were less successful. Today, all the dominant OSs are children of either Unix or VMS.
And MVS, which went nowhere, but in the sense it's always been there and, it seems, always will be.
Cough... systems... cough...
We can do better. Plan 9 existed. Apple's Newton has a unique take on data files. AS/400's map all storage to memory addresses giving a single address space for everything. With Smalltalk, applications would just be new classes you import into your system.
The key to Unix's success seems to be not doing better, but doing as little as possible while still remaining useful.
And yes, it's a bit disappointing that, when we did better, we were less successful. Today, all the dominant OSs are children of either Unix or VMS.
And MVS, which went nowhere, but in the sense it's always been there and, it seems, always will be.