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I think there have been many missed opportunities in computing, however I'd suggest that the Internet and GPL (open source licencing in general) would have come

I think there have been many missed opportunities in computing, however I'd suggest that the Internet and GPL (open source licencing in general) would have come regardless of the diversity of operating systems. Both these two innovations have really bound the software world together - compatability these days is really at the TCP level (eg. docker and APIs) and allows for a massive diversity of architectures (kafka, istio, materialize.io, IFTTT, Macrometa etc) - the bar has moved in a way. 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/20.500.11850/147091/eth-26082-02.pdf 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 :)

kmeisthax 6y ago
Oracle v. Google would have happened eventually. The underlying problem is the law, not the litigants. In any other field that deals with copyright, the idea that copyright protection extends to what is effectively a series of headings and summaries would be obvious. The problem is that copyright is a poor fit for software - our headings and summaries carry function to them, and changing them breaks code. In general, the law doesn't want to grant copyright over purely functional things, or even things where functionality and creativity are frustratingly mixed. That's why boat hulls and hardware have separate ownership regimes - copyright over them was explicitly rejected. But we also explicitly said software is copyrightable, which leaves open the question of where the unprotected function ends and the protected creativity starts. 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.

kmeisthax 6y ago

Oracle v. Google would have happened eventually. The underlying problem is the law, not the litigants. In any other field that deals with copyright, the idea that copyright protection extends to what is effectively a series of headings and summaries would be obvious. The problem is that copyright is a poor fit for software - our headings and summaries carry function to them, and changing them breaks code. In general, the law doesn't want to grant copyright over purely functional things, or even things where functionality and creativity are frustratingly mixed. That's why boat hulls and hardware have separate ownership regimes - copyright over them was explicitly rejected. But we also explicitly said software is copyrightable, which leaves open the question of where the unprotected function ends and the protected creativity starts. 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.