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Unix with its "worse is better" simplicity steamrollered vastly more complex operating systems (Multics above all). It even steamrollered its own successor. P
by MarkusWandel 5y ago
Unix with its "worse is better" simplicity steamrollered vastly more complex operating systems (Multics above all).
It even steamrollered its own successor. Plan 9 is brilliant, but Unix already served most people's needs so why change.
Mental game: If they had managed to quickly push the whole thing out as what is now called open source, while Unix was still proprietary, how would the world look now?
- generalizations 5y ago> how would the world look now Computer system security would be vastly superior, I imagine. Webpages would be mounted file systems with restricted permissions systems, and browser apps would be command line utilities. Both would have benefited from the same security that UNIX systems use these days.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoGiven that webpages aren't static today, it seems just as likely that in that universe sites would expect you to execute them natively, mounted over 9P. This actually could still work out since Plan 9 did could easily sandbox things, though the security angle would still make me nervous.
- pcwalton 5y agoWe've had sandboxing for a decade on mainstream operating systems with mainstream browsers. I doubt that just adopting Plan 9 would offer any meaningful security improvements over the status quo. It would just be switching a big pile of non-memory-safe C++ for a big pile of non-memory-safe C.
- pjmlp 5y agoWell, at least we will be using C Machines in a decade, if the trend for hardware memory tagging keeps going on.
- justin66 5y ago> Mental game: If they had managed to quickly push the whole thing out as what is now called open source, while Unix was still proprietary, how would the world look now? An AT&T that was willing to do that would have been willing to let BSDI slide. Linux would have died in the crib and we'd all be using BSD right now.
- IshKebab 5y agoFewer bugs I imagine. I was reading up on symlinks (trying to find a good reference for how much of a bad idea they are) and found this: https://9p.io/sys/doc/lexnames.html https://9p.io/sys/doc/lexnames.html Kind of sad that Plan 9 got rid of them literally decades ago and we're still stuck dealing with their mess.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoWhat mess?
- IshKebab 5y agoRead the page, but essentially `/foo/bar/..` is not the same as `/foo`. It makes loads of things way more complicated than you'd expect, e.g. normalising paths now requires filesystem access, and normalising paths that only partially exist is really complicated. Another annoying issue is symlink loops, but I'm not sure if Plan 9's solution solves that.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoIt never caused me any real world problems, and I like making links. However am up for better solutions.
- wbl 5y agoPlan 9 would have to contend with a huge install base issue. Remember academics had been using Unix freely since the 1960's and had a massive pile of code plus every machine worth mentioning. Plan 9 would be trying to catch up from a very delayed position.
- pjmlp 5y agoWoah there, UNIX only reached academic world after UNIX V6, released in 1975 and its first Assembly version was born in 1969, only being released to the world in 1973.
- nmz 5y agoUnix's major feature was that it was free.
- pjmlp 5y agoI have another mental game, if UNIX had been sold at the same price as Multics and VMS, how would the world look now? UNIX only steamrollered other OSes, becasue it was already "open source" during its early decade until AT&T got back the rights to sell, and the BSD lawsuit came to be alongside the prohibition of UNIX V6 annotated source book.