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From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@gmail.com>
To: Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] If not Linux, then what?
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 16:07:39 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAFNqd5VpUE9OsKqfHDW8-76S46PYtnTJWDWAs0FU6o+73B4ZfQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <13c5c36e-c84d-e020-d09e-51c8c502dc6d@kilonet.net>

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On Mon, 26 Aug 2019 at 19:14, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:

>
> https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/26/0051234/celebrating-the-28th-anniversary-of-the-linux-kernel
>
> Leaving licensing and copyright issues out of this mental exercise, what
> would we have now if it wasn't for Linux? Not what you'd WANT it to be,
> although that can add to the discussion, but what WOULD it be?
>
> I'm not asking as a proponent of Linux. If anything, I was dragged
> kicking and screaming into the current day and have begrudgingly ceded
> my server space to Linux.
>
> But if not for Linux, would it be BSD? A System V variant? Or (the
> horror) Windows NT?
>

I can make a firm "dunno" sound :-)

Some facts can come together to point away from a number of possibilities...

- If you look at the number of hobbyist "Unix homages" that emerged at
around that time, it's clear that there was a sizable community of
interested folk willing to build their own thing, and that weren't
interested in Windows NT.  (Nay, one should put that more strongly...  That
had their minds set on something NOT from Microsoft.)  So I think we can
cross Windows NT off the list.

- OS/2 should briefly come on the list.  It was likable in many ways, if
only IBM had actually supported it...  But it suffers from something of the
same problem as Windows NT; there were a lot of folk that were only
slightly less despising of IBM at the time than of Microsoft.

- Hurd was imagined to be the next thing...

To borrow from my cookie file...

"Of course 5  years from now that will be different,  but 5 years from
now  everyone  will  be  running  free  GNU on  their  200  MIPS,  64M
SPARCstation-5."  -- Andrew Tanenbaum, 1992.
%
"You'll be  rid of most of us  when BSD-detox or GNU  comes out, which
should happen in the next few months (yeah, right)." -- Richard Tobin,
1992. [BSD did follow within a year]
%
"I am aware of the benefits  of a micro kernel approach.  However, the
fact remains  that Linux is  here, and GNU  isn't --- and  people have
been working on Hurd for a lot longer than Linus has been working on
Linux." -- Ted T'so, 1992.

Ted has been on this thread, and should be amused (and slightly disturbed!)
that his old statements are being held here and there, ready to trot out
:-).

In the absence of Linux, perhaps hackers would have flocked to Hurd, but
there was enough going on that there was plenty of room for them to have
done so anyways.

I'm not sure what to blame on whatever happened post-1992, though I'd put
some on Microsoft Research having taken the wind out of Mach's sails by
hiring off a bunch of the relevant folk.  In order for Hurd to "make it,"
Mach has to "make it," too, and it looked like they were depending on CMU
to be behind that.  (I'm not sure I'm right about that; happy to hear a
better story.)

Anyway, Hurd *might* have been a "next thing," and I don't think the
popularity of Linux was enough to have completely taken wind out of its
sails, given that there's the dozens of "Unix homages" out there.

- I'd like to imagine Plan 9 being an alternative, but it was "properly
commercial" for a goodly long time (hence not amenable to attaching waves
of hackers to it to add their favorite device drivers), and was never taken
as a serious answer.  Many of us had admired it from afar via the Dr Dobbs
Journal issue (when was that?  mid or late '90s?) but only from afar.

- FreeBSD is the single best answer I can throw up as a possibility, as it
was the one actively targeting 80386 hardware.  And that had the big risk
of the AT&T lawsuit lurking over it, so had that gone in a different
direction, then that is a branch sadly easily trimmed.

If we lop both Linux and FreeBSD off the list of possibilities, I don't
imagine Windows NT or OS/2 bubble to the top, instead, a critical mass
would have stood behind ... something else, I'd think.  I don't know which
to suggest.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2019-08-28 20:08 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 96+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2019-08-26 23:13 Arthur Krewat
2019-08-26 23:27 ` Warner Losh
2019-08-26 23:37   ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-26 23:56   ` William Pechter
2019-08-27  0:19     ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-27  0:30       ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27  0:58         ` Rob Pike
2019-08-27  1:06           ` Clem Cole
2019-08-27  2:53           ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27  9:47             ` Rob Pike
2019-08-27  7:47           ` arnold
2019-08-27 16:05           ` [TUHS] Running v10 Angelo Papenhoff
2019-08-27 16:27             ` Henry Bent
2019-08-28  4:22               ` Jason Stevens
2019-08-28  7:34                 ` Angelo Papenhoff
2019-08-28 16:46                   ` Henry Bent
2019-08-27  0:59         ` [TUHS] If not Linux, then what? Arthur Krewat
2019-08-27  1:26           ` Dan Cross
2019-08-27  2:45             ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27  3:14               ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-27 14:55                 ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27 22:30                   ` George Michaelson
2019-08-27 22:40                     ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27 22:46                       ` George Michaelson
2019-08-27 22:59                         ` [TUHS] [SPAM] " Larry McVoy
2019-08-27 23:10                           ` [TUHS] " Clem Cole
2019-08-28  0:07                             ` George Michaelson
2019-08-28  3:22                           ` [TUHS] [SPAM] " Rob Pike
2019-08-28  3:25                             ` Rob Pike
2019-08-28  4:05                             ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-28 13:52                               ` Clem Cole
2019-08-28 14:31                                 ` [TUHS] " Larry McVoy
2019-08-28 14:57                                   ` Clem Cole
2019-08-28  6:19                         ` Wesley Parish
2019-08-28  6:30                           ` Peter Jeremy
2019-08-28 11:05                             ` Jason Stevens
2019-08-28 11:11                               ` Arrigo Triulzi
2019-08-28 14:04                               ` Clem Cole
2019-08-28 16:34                                 ` Henry Bent
2019-08-28 17:32                                   ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-28 17:51                                     ` Jon Forrest
2019-08-28 18:56                                     ` Clem Cole
2019-08-28 20:23                                       ` Arrigo Triulzi
2019-08-29  3:24                                       ` Lawrence Stewart
2019-08-29 10:55                                         ` Tony Finch
2019-08-28 13:57                             ` Clem Cole
2019-08-28 12:46                           ` Warner Losh
2019-08-27 23:16                       ` Bakul Shah
2019-08-27 23:33                         ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-28  0:21                           ` Bakul Shah
2019-08-28  1:21                             ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-28  1:46                               ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27  0:48   ` Clem Cole
2019-08-27  1:25     ` Gregg Levine
2019-08-27  2:16   ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-08-27  2:39     ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27  5:54       ` Adam Thornton
2019-08-27  6:05         ` Gregg Levine
2019-08-27  1:17 ` Dan Cross
2019-08-28  3:53 ` Charles H. Sauer
2019-08-28  4:30 ` Jason Stevens
2019-08-28  9:36 ` Angus Robinson
2019-08-28  9:50   ` Michael Kjörling
2019-08-28 10:48     ` arnold
2019-08-28 14:10   ` Earl Baugh
2019-08-28 14:55     ` Clem Cole
2019-08-28 14:22   ` Charles H Sauer
2019-08-28 15:00     ` Steve Nickolas
2019-08-28 15:37       ` Richard Salz
2019-08-28 19:54         ` Peter Jeremy
2019-08-28 20:05           ` Christopher Browne
2019-08-28 20:07 ` Christopher Browne [this message]
2019-08-28 20:27   ` Adam Thornton
2019-08-28 20:56     ` William Pechter
2019-08-28 22:24       ` Clem cole
2019-08-28 22:27     ` William Pechter
2019-08-28 22:53       ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-29 18:40       ` Nemo Nusquam
2019-08-29 19:18         ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2019-08-28 22:28     ` Clem cole
2019-08-28 22:48       ` Adam Thornton
2019-08-28 23:01         ` William Pechter
2019-08-28 23:09           ` Adam Thornton
2019-08-29  6:37           ` Wesley Parish
2019-08-28 23:04       ` Gregg Levine
2019-08-29 11:12     ` Tony Finch
2019-08-28 23:19   ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-08-29 13:31     ` A. P. Garcia
2019-08-29 13:55       ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-29 15:54         ` Thomas Paulsen
2019-08-29 19:19           ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2019-08-31  1:35             ` Dave Horsfall
2019-08-31 15:14               ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2019-08-31 16:58     ` Christopher Browne
2019-08-31 21:20       ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-08-28 21:02 ` Thomas Paulsen

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