>> I wouldn't sit here and claim Plan 9 was perfect, because if it was, we'd be using it. Many perfect and awesome systems have been built that never saw signi

>> I wouldn't sit here and claim Plan 9 was perfect, because if it was, we'd be using it. Many perfect and awesome systems have been built that never saw significant adoption. I agree with ESR's observation: "Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." Source: https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html Another amazing OS that never caught on was BeOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS Neal Stephenson's description of BeOS as "fully operational Batmobiles" is accurate and it is sad that BeOS did not become more mainstream. See https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/~clay/classes/spring2010/os/inthebeginning.pdf https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/~clay/classes/spring2010/os...