> If Plan 9 had been released earlier before Unix took over the world, then there's a good chance Plan 9 would've taken over the world instead. If something di

> If Plan 9 had been released earlier before Unix took over the world, then there's a good chance Plan 9 would've taken over the world instead. If something different had happened things might have been different. Maybe. There's also a good chance it wouldn't have, in my opinion, and Unix still would have taken over the world. > Bad decisions can be made without the second system effect coming into play, and vice versa. Yes but Plan 9 is a classic second system syndrome. Unix made "everything is a file, but not quite". Plan 9 took that to the absolute extreme, demonstrating that they clearly missed what was good about that Unix design choice, which was was not some theoretical purity. Unix was a highly network-able system, and Plan 9 took that to the absolute extreme trying to develop a distributed single system image, again missing what was good about Unix networking, which was not the ability to make a remote machine behave as though it was the same system as the local one. > Releasing plan 9 as a propietary OS during that time was pure folly, but not the second system effect. No you're right, the proprietaryness of the OS wasn't the part that was the second system syndrome. Over-engineering something that was not needed or wanted and releasing it 8-10 years after many successful commercial and academic Unixes had been used. I mean if it was a research effort to inform how Unix might evolve and be improved in the real world sure, but they expected actual users to switch over to this warmed over Unix-ish looking thing with lots of things you don't want, oh and it's incompatible with your existing systems. Come on. I know this hurts Plan 9 fanatics to hear, but it's not amazing. You can listen on a network port with a file, and you can access a file or run a program on some other computer "in the ether". Neat. Then you go on with your life.