[TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other

[lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

On Sun, Feb 19, 2017 at 09:46:47PM +0800, Jason Stevens wrote:
> It's a net/2 something much later.  I'm interested in what would have
> been an encumbered pre net/2 release of 4.2 or 4.3 for the i386...
> I found out that CMU had BSD running on Mach, and I suspect there is
> straight ports as well.  It's that evelotionary dead end of 386 UNIX
> from 1986-1991 that interests me as they clearly could have had the
> market but they obviously blew it.

So before I start, let me state for the record I'm a died in the wool
BSD guy.  I grew up on BSD at University and then went to Sun and worked
on SunOS 4.x which was a BSD derived OS (many people at the time called it
"Bugfixed BSD" though it was more than that).

In my opinion, 386 BSD and friends lost because they didn't have a Linus.
They needed a strong leader that would provide direction to rally around.
Jolitz, as much as I like him, was not that leader.  Nor was Jordan or
Theo or Chris.  And BSDi, don't get me started.

A friend of mine once said "They couldn't decide who was going to drive
the big red fire truck, so instead they each got to sit on and drive
their own personal toy fire truck".  The mental image always fit for
me.

It's a big part of why I threw my support behind Linux.  A lot of the
BSD crowd considered me a "traitor" for doing so at the time.  Shrug.

Linus had the qualities of being a good programmer, a good architect,
and a good manager.  I've never seen all 3 in a person before or since.