Had that happened we wouldn't be wasting so much hardware today (old smartphones/tablets/laptops/etc.) but could have leveraged it all in a unified private network. Every single computer in my home would be now part of a distributed computing platform managed by a distributed OS.
The irony is that today the entire Cloud architecture viz. Docker, Kubernetes, REST etc. frameworks are actually recreating the above design!
On the other hand, I would say there are still technical and fundamental reasons we're not using something like Plan 9, not just economic ones:
- Plan 9 was designed for LANs, not WANs. HTTP became the protocol of WANs, and the protocol of a (load balanced) client-server architecture, rather than something more peer-to-peer. So I believe that any of the systems you mentioned wouldn't be deployable that widely.
(Though it's true that k8s is almost always deployed within a single fast cloud network too)
- Network deployment mechanisms like captive portals at hotels had to arise, which would limit a more peer-to-peer architecture. Also NAT forwarding.
- The software world moves fast, and upgrading and compatibility are fundamentally hard problems. The cloud providers pay armies of SREs a lot of money to do this. The result is not what I like, but I have to admit they do a better job than what I do for self-hosted services!
So centralization does have inherent technical advantages. I'd like to think that there's some way around that :-)
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A related point is that Apple invested in Bonjour / zeroconf back in the day, but I feel like a lot of the functionality and mindshare has been lost to the cloud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_(software)
I guess I do use this with Linux now! But for my case, it's fairly bare bones and doesn't feel that robust / debuggable.