Yes it does have a couple of nice ideas, and it was much better to use than Windows 3.x + MS-DOS, but that is about it.
All the UNIX based OSes that I really appreciate, have moved beyond it, namely NeXTSTEP, Solaris/NeWS, Irix, Plan 9/Inferno.
Thankfully only BSD and GNU/Linux are stuck into being a continuum of UNIX clones without much to add, when you see their conferences it always boils down to kernel features or filesystems.
GNU/Linux has the ingredients to make an Amiga like desktop experience, with D-BUS, GNOME/KDE, but the fragmentation and love for POSIX CLI applications just doesn't make it worthwhile to try to make it work.
Look at iOS, macOS, Android, Windows (UWP), GenodeOS, Fuchsia, Haiku, Azure Sphere for the pursuit of modern ideas in OS research. The fact that some of those have a POSIX like kernel (or deeply customise Linux kernel) it is just an implementation detail of the overall architecture.
With the Exemption of Plan9 all the OS's you named are pure Unixes. As a example FreeBSD is nearly a mirror of Solaris. Nexstep was pure BSD with a Mach Kernel (OO development was the great seller on NextStep)...Irix? Well OpenGL and XFS is available under Linux.
>iOS, macOS, Android, Windows (UWP), GenodeOS, Fuchsia, Haiku, Azure Sphere for the pursuit of modern ideas in OS research
Haiku modern?? BeOS is 25 years old.
Hint, it goes beyond doing CLI applications and daemons.
BeOS is 25 years older and 25 years younger than UNIX, yes modern.
So please tell me then. All Unixes have more or less the same FHS, Solaris did nothing different as..lets say BSD in the User-space nor did Irix, so tell me what did Solaris or Irix and even Nextstep fundamentally different then any other Unix?
>BeOS is 25 years older and 25 years younger than UNIX, yes modern.
Yeah lets stop here, it's getting ridiculous.
Irix had Inventor.
NeXT had the mach kernel, drivers written in Objective-C, Renderman, EOF, WebObjects, DisplayPostscript.
Ridiculous is putting up with certain clueless people online that don't have any idea of what they are talking about.
>explored the idea of Java based kernel drivers
They even made a Java OS a Browser and a Chip, we all know what a stupid decision that was, you could have say ZFS which is against the unix philosophy (one program one job) but you forgot that i think.
>Irix had Inventor.
Windows had paint, and Mac the almighty HyperCard...but that's NOT the Operating-system nor does it make any difference Unix-wise.
>NeXT had the mach kernel, drivers written in Objective-C
Ahh, now you bring the kernel argument i already brought, yeah drivers written in the beloved Objective-C (is that a feature or a User-space thing?)...you know Multics was made with EPL waaay earlier.
They are pure and certified Unixes (not NeXT, but MacOS X is/was), based on Unix ideas..basta.
(Yeah, Linux is a server OS, not news.)
cgroups has been a thing on mainframes for decades.
And your comment about it having been a thing on mainframes underscores my point.
The server story for Linux is evolving (and maturing) greatly, and very quickly. The Linux of today is not at all like the Linux from 2010. To say that Linux is stuck in some sort of legacy UNIX quagmire is just silly.
That's a crime to say "finesse" and "systemd" in the same discussion.
And, on cgroups, I think AIX has something like that but much, much, MUCH better.
It’s not the wrong type of solution but systemd is somewhat stinky compared to what we could have had.
Generic is the complete wrong word for systemd, it's the opposite of Generic.
>The two are huge and novel developments in OS design
Yeah "new" since the 1960 on a Computer called PDP10 from DEC
Nah... you can't take one of the handful of major styles of interaction with computing devices and diminish adherence to that style as just 'gatekeeping'. There are moments where the strengths of GUI interaction is useful (discovery of options, selection of individual objects, etc.), but modern systems are complex and large enough that you can't really walk away from the idea of expressing operations and state linguistically without walking away from tools you need to do your job efficiently (or at all). So yeah, maybe CLI is less accessible and more difficult for newcomers, but the problems they solve aren't necessarily easy, either.
However... I do think there are many opportunities for both better accessibility in CLI's and better interoperability between CLI's and GUI's. Better discovery of options in CLI would help (autocomplete, etc.), as would a better connection between the GUI and CLI worlds. (Lisp has some good ideas where the "terminal" remembers the object it prints and allows interaction with those objects, as opposed to just remembering a string character representation of them. Microsoft's Office applications similarly will write macro code for you as you interact with the UI - which is a great way to understand the relationship between the two worlds.)
I like and want the powerful combination of the CLI and GUI applications.
It's generally a joy to use Linux. In some cases (like HP LaserJet printers) even more painless than Windows and macOS!
Happy Linux user since 2004/5.
Everything else is painful in some way or another.
And really we do have layer that can connect all of the different systems together. Namely IP. So even if we had fundamentally different systems, there is no reason why intercommunication wouldn't be possible at this point.
By the mid-90s I was furious with both Microsoft and Apple for setting computing back by at least a decade.
You could - with extreme effort - make an Atari ST multitask. And of course with the Amiga it was built in.
So why did we throw that away and go backwards to DOS and then single-process Windows - which eventually reinvented multitasking nearly a decade later and sold it as if it was the most astounding development in the history of computing?
Of course there were technical challenges - protected memory, protected processes, and so on. But the earliest versions of Windows didn't have those either.
So it was a disappointing and frustrating time - an alienating difference of philosophy between consumer computing designed for creativity and exploration, and box-shifting commodity computing designed for form-filling and bureaucracy, which might allow you to have some fun after hours if you behaved yourself and the machine didn't crash.
Considering how smart the Amiga team were, it would have been very interesting to see what they could have done with ubiquitous fast networking, high-res graphics and video, and pocketability.
I suspect the result would have been far more open and inspiring than the corporate sand trap we have today.
You may have missed the last 20 years of Web evolution, because the Web is now a very messy and hard to implement platform. Even Microsoft gave up on implementing a browser and switched to Chromium.
Because cheap commodity harware, a single Intel CPU controlling everything, won out over an expensive custom multi-chip solution.
Every Amiga model was a new model, with large amounts of engineering effort put into it, until eventually the platform just couldn't keep up with how quickly PCs were dropping in cost.
Sure in 1989 an Intel x86 based system was a joke compared to an Amiga, and it was a joke in 1990, and 1991, and 1992, but it was less of a joke every year.
When it all began PC's didn't even have anything that could charitably be called sound capabilities, but year after new cards were released, there was massive competition, at first at the high end, but then sound cards got cheaper and cheaper until one day Microsoft demanded that for a computer to be Windows Certified it had to just include one, and it was up to OEMs to figure out how.
Meanwhile Amiga didn't benefit from that technological explosion.
Same thing happened for graphics.
Same thing happened for networking.
Same thing happened for hard drives, and cd-rom drives, and types of RAM, and literally everything else.
Technology has often been one step back two steps forward, going from mini->micro people complained about the same thing, and going from PCs->Smartphones, it happened again. Remember early smartphones / PDAs? They had a maximum process limit, in the low double digits! Storage that was wiped out if the battery died! Everything ran in the same address space!
And remember the first 5 or so major versions of Android? It wasn't exactly a pleasant system to use.
But it got better.
The thing is, all in one custom hardware solutions will always, at first, beat out general purpose computing. But those custom hardware solutions are expensive, and slow, to engineer. Now if you are Apple and you can manage to find economies of scale to do everything in house, great!
But Amiga didn't have that scale. They had custom in house everything, which, and they were competing against not just Microsoft, but literally every other consumer PC hardware manufacturer on the planet who were in a fight to the death to drop prices on DOS/Windows PCs peripheral by peripheral.
So after 7 years, all we had were expansion slots and faster CPUs. The OCS -> ECS chipset upgrade was very minor. That's basically it.
Finally, at the end of 1992, the AGA machines (Amiga 1200 and 4000) were released. We finally had upgraded graphics that didn't even keep pace with SuperVGA. The A1200 was also totally gimped with no fast memory and a slow 68020 that was now over 8 years old...
Mine is a US-centric perspective, it but always seemed like Commodore and Atari were selling niche follow-ons to their eight-bit lines, with momentum heavily toward DOS, even in the second half of the 1980's.
Open up the back of a 1987-era computer magazine, and the pages are full of companies that will sell you a DOS machine, expansion cards, operating system, etc. All these participants in the market are sinking money into the platform to try to establish a competitive advantage by making something better. (The Compaq Deskpro 386 and various video cards come to mind immediately as places where the market rapidly outran the original developers of the platform.)
But if you want an Amiga, you're stuck with Commodore. If you want an ST, you're stuck with Atari. Two individual companies both trying to build an entire _platform_ - custom hardware and OS - that's competitive with the collective output of an entire segment of the industry. I guess it's easy to say this now, but both of those companies picked a hard battle to fight - and both did very well, all things considered.
> ... single-process Windows - which eventually reinvented multitasking nearly a decade later and sold it as if it was the most astounding development in the history of computing?
The development wasn't the technology, the development was getting that technology into a delivery channel where it was relevant to a large group of people. This is why Windows 3.0 was such a big deal - there wasn't anything technically novel in it, but it was cheap, worked with what the customer base already owned, and attracted enough investment to overcome its (many) faults.
I'd love to see a next wave in personal computing, starting with a clean slate, building on the research, insights and learning from the mistakes that have been made. I have no doubt that it will happen, the question is only when.
As for interoperability: Even on the same platform there are countless problems getting software to talk to each other, so I don't think that a new system will make the situation any worse.
[1] http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf
[2] https://www.tindie.com/products/lutherjohnson/makerlisp-ez80...
See “the innovators dilemma” for the process.
The reason Unix was so successful was precisely because it was simple and portable a d designed to get out of the way. It was as unremarkable as possible, by design. All the interesting stuff is left to application developers. You want to implement a relational file system, go ahead. You want to develop your own GUI layer, fine. Compared to the other major OSes of the day like VMS, Pick, PrimeOS, etc it’s as unoppinionated as possible. Likewise with C, which is intended to be as low level and paradigmless as they could. Just an abstraction over assembler just as Unix is a thin abstraction over the hardware.
A computer pre-internet felt a lot more like an island. I had an Amiga, but I wasn't aware of 90% of the stuff that was out there, and could barely afford to buy a compiler.
Speaking of islands though, check out this FujiNet thing!
Turns out, Atari 8-bit computers have device independent I/O.
Suddenly, all those little islands are connected, and people are writing games in basic, playing together online.
If there was a cheap and easy to install OS in that era they’d all use it. Oh wait that was DOS & Windows, that was the whole point, that’s what happened, it was adopted because 999/1,000 vendors are interested in cost cutting not innovation.
It’s hard to celebrate cost cutters. History never celebrates the crummy cost cutters. I feel no nostalgia for that.
I personally love using a stylus, have have back to my old Palm Pilot days.
Having said that, some of the missed opportunities of note are:
MINT: Gem and Tos weren't really developed much by Atari, but they did buy in MINT which has preemptive multi tasking and memory protection. With the Aes being retargetable (graphic cards), gdos vector fonts and postscript printing, tcp and lan networking stacks, shell, global shortcut system, posix compatibility and multi-user capabilities, it managed to evolve Tos to effectively a unix with usable desktop aka a standard OSX or linux-on-the-desktop well before now.
Secondly, choosing A2 instead of Android would have been huge. A compiled multithreaded, multitasking self-hosted OS with GC, zooming UI, 3x faster than Linux and small enough for one person to understand (250k kernel).
https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20....
One other benefit here would have been no Google-Oracle lawsuit to mess with API copyright :)
Maybe in the world where Android never happened, some other company stumbled upon this rich vein of confusion, and we're dealing with SCO/Novell/Attachmate/Whoever v. Apple over who can implement UNIX APIs in their kernels.
What I remember from that era is that nothing was compatible with anything else. It took a lot of work to interoperate between two PCs, let alone cross the gap between OSes. So for a long time, I have kind of taken the current world of few OSes that are highly interoperable as being a great thing: you can build your own Linux machine and still do real work with people on Windows and Mac, etc.
But the more I learn about computing in the 80s and early 90s, the more I’m impressed by the variety and diversity of ideas that came out of that era. I see now that today’s standardization has a real cost, which is that we don’t really see new ideas or new paradigms.
For the HN crowd, especially those who are older than me and can remember the earlier era of computing, what do you think about that trade off and where we’ve ended up today?
Are we better off living in a world where all computers can work together with minimal fuss? Or would it be better if we still had a wide range of vendors taking significantly different approaches and innovating at a much faster pace - albeit in incompatible ways?