Politics and price. C and Unix were free, other options were not. Oberon is also unsuitable for most use-cases if taken to Wirth's extreme, though the other var

Politics and price. C and Unix were free, other options were not. Oberon is also unsuitable for most use-cases if taken to Wirth's extreme, though the other variations are better they were still very niche (also it was never exactly well-known or well-distributed). With Pascal, which Pascal? The early Pascal's needed extensions (leading to the Modula line and Delphi ultimately). They also tended to cost, people like free. Politics are why Ada lost, along with costs. Ada, as a mandatory language for a time in DOD, had a compelled audience with "deep" (not always that deep) pockets who could afford $10k/seat licenses (or more), that didn't make it a suitable language for the *nix hackers of the 90s and Linux (in particular) has eaten the world. So C and C++ won out as the systems languages. Not because of quality, but price and politics. EDIT: I mean Unix broadly, there were obviously non-free commercial Unixes.