Can you describe more about what you see as this originally-envisioned user space? Briefly, yes. Two aspects were of particular interest to me, although if yo

Can you describe more about what you see as this originally-envisioned user space? Briefly, yes. Two aspects were of particular interest to me, although if you ask the HURD developers from back then they could likely point out others: 1. Interactive programs should be uniformly customizable, extensible, and self-documenting - roughly in the manner of Emacs. That sounds like a trite thing. After all, the programs we wound up with have all three traits. For example, Gimp can be customized, new commands can be written in extension languages, and it has a great deal of on-line documentation. I mean something more specific but hard to convey concisely. Most of Gimp is not written as extension packages, which betrays an architectural weakness in contrast to emacs. Gimp's interaction model and customization model is awkward and ad hoc, compared to emacs. The on-line documentation of Gimp is not designed in a way such that its enhancement is a natural part of writing extensions. I don't mean that Emacs is perfect in these regards - it certainly isn't. I do mean that the architectural approach it takes is vastly more sane than what the interactive programs we wound up with use. (Don't mean to pick on Gimp. The observations apply as well to the Open Office suite, to Gnome, to Firefox, and more. We have a big, barely maintainable heap of discordant and vaguely conceived functionality.) 2. On a more mundane level, even the command line got horked. You know how (nearly) all GNU command line programs have --version and --help options and so forth? At least when I was working at FSF the notion was that that coding standard was a stepping stone to a shell much more like the much-loved shell on the Tops-20 operating system. The standard was supposed to be gradually refined so that those standard "--help" messages could be automagically used by the shell to intelligently prompt for arguments to a program. I guess I should add that a lisp - most of us that I knew assumed Scheme - would figure prominently as the main extension language (rather than Emacs lisp). Why a lisp? Well, it had a proven track record and that was our aesthetic -- I'll leave it at that.