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Reminds me of this classic I’ve first read many years ago: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html In all ser

Reminds me of this classic I’ve first read many years ago: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html In all seriousness, I have a high respect for Unix and Unix-like systems, particularly FOSS implementations like Linux and FreeBSD. When I first started using Linux in 2004 as a high schooler who grew up on Windows and who used classic Macs in elementary school, the power of the Unix command line and the vast selection of professional-grade software that was available for free, and legally with the source code, too, was mind-blowing. Not too long after that, I started learning about the history of Unix and about its design philosophy. I had a new dream: I wanted to become a computer scientist just like Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie working for a place like Bell Labs, or become a professor and lead research projects like the BSDs back when Berkeley had the CSRG. Downloading and using Linux in 11th grade pushed me away from my alternative thoughts of majoring in linguistics, mathematics, or city planning. Sometime in graduate school I started paying more attention to the Xerox PARC legacy of the Mac, and I started realizing that perhaps Unix was not the pinnacle of operating systems design. I got bitten by the Lisp and Smalltalk bugs, and later I got bitten by the statically-typed functional programming bug (think Haskell and ML). These days my conception of a dream operating system is basically an alternative 1990s universe where somehow the grander visions of some Apple researchers and engineers working on Lisp (e.g., Newton’s planned Lisp OS, Dylan, SK8) came to fruition, complete with Apple’s then-devotion to usability. The classic Macintosh interface and UI guidelines combined with a Lisp substrate that enabled composition and malleability would have knocked the socks off of NeXTstep, and I say this as a big fan of NeXT and Jobs-era Mac OS X. This is my dream OS for workstation-class personal computing. With that said, I have immense respect for Unix, as well as its official successor, Plan 9.

rjsw 1y ago
Your dream did happen, Interface Builder on NeXT evolved from a Lisp application on classic Macintosh [1], I have a copy of a paper on SOS Interface. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Hullot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Hullot
anyfoo 1y ago
> Sometime in graduate school I started paying more attention to the Xerox PARC legacy of the Mac, and I started realizing that perhaps Unix was not the pinnacle of operating systems design. For me, that watershed moment came when I looked at IBM's AS/400, known today as "IBM i". Despite having used computers since the 80s, and Unix/Linux since about the mid-90s, only much later AS/400 made me realize how extremely unixoid almost every OS I know is (well, every OS I knew after the 8 bit micro era or so). Just like you, it also made me realize how UNIX maybe isn't the answer to all, and that it's maybe not such a good thing that we've pretty much settled on it. I've heard that apparently MULTICS, one of UNIX's major influences, gives people a similar impression when they revisit it nowadays, and realize how advanced it was. I personally have not looked into it yet. (The other OS that expanded my horizon on how different OSes can be from what I know is MVS on IBM mainframes, but unlike AS/400, not really on a necessarily good way.)
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  For me, it was Plan 9. In some ways, it was mind-bending to not have root. I haven't played with it recently; maybe it has gotten easier to play with alternative OSes since I tried 10 years ago.
- floren 1y ago
  > made me realize how extremely unixoid almost every OS I know is It's a bit disappointing that every time somebody decides to write their own kernel, the first thing they do is implement some subset of the POSIX spec.
  - anyfoo 1y ago
    Indeed. But to be fair, in today's world it is not only somewhat hard to imagine an OS that does not rely on things such as a filesystem with opaque binary files, directories, and hierarchical paths connecting these, but in order to properly communicate with the "outside world" you more or less have to have those things. Even AS/400 / IBM i added IFS, which is basically a bolted on hierarchical filesystem, to their system a long time ago by now. Still sad that it has to be that way. I've long come off of thinking "everything is a file", and a file then just being a binary blob, is a good thing. (That's not even talking about other concepts from Unix we take for fully granted yet.)
pjmlp 1y ago
I went down a similar path. I was already tainted by starting on 8 an 16 bit home computers, the magic of Amiga and OS/2, before getting into UNIX via Xenix. The wonderful dungeon of the university library did the rest, showing me all the alternative universe. It also helped my university was keen into teaching the ways of Smalltalk, Lisp, ML, Prolog, Oberon, in addition to classical UNIX lectures. I was really lucky in that regard.

rjsw 1y ago

Your dream did happen, Interface Builder on NeXT evolved from a Lisp application on classic Macintosh [1], I have a copy of a paper on SOS Interface. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Hullot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Hullot

anyfoo 1y ago

> Sometime in graduate school I started paying more attention to the Xerox PARC legacy of the Mac, and I started realizing that perhaps Unix was not the pinnacle of operating systems design. For me, that watershed moment came when I looked at IBM's AS/400, known today as "IBM i". Despite having used computers since the 80s, and Unix/Linux since about the mid-90s, only much later AS/400 made me realize how extremely unixoid almost every OS I know is (well, every OS I knew after the 8 bit micro era or so). Just like you, it also made me realize how UNIX maybe isn't the answer to all, and that it's maybe not such a good thing that we've pretty much settled on it. I've heard that apparently MULTICS, one of UNIX's major influences, gives people a similar impression when they revisit it nowadays, and realize how advanced it was. I personally have not looked into it yet. (The other OS that expanded my horizon on how different OSes can be from what I know is MVS on IBM mainframes, but unlike AS/400, not really on a necessarily good way.)

lenerdenator 1y ago
For me, it was Plan 9. In some ways, it was mind-bending to not have root. I haven't played with it recently; maybe it has gotten easier to play with alternative OSes since I tried 10 years ago.
floren 1y ago
> made me realize how extremely unixoid almost every OS I know is It's a bit disappointing that every time somebody decides to write their own kernel, the first thing they do is implement some subset of the POSIX spec.
- anyfoo 1y ago
  Indeed. But to be fair, in today's world it is not only somewhat hard to imagine an OS that does not rely on things such as a filesystem with opaque binary files, directories, and hierarchical paths connecting these, but in order to properly communicate with the "outside world" you more or less have to have those things. Even AS/400 / IBM i added IFS, which is basically a bolted on hierarchical filesystem, to their system a long time ago by now. Still sad that it has to be that way. I've long come off of thinking "everything is a file", and a file then just being a binary blob, is a good thing. (That's not even talking about other concepts from Unix we take for fully granted yet.)

pjmlp 1y ago

I went down a similar path. I was already tainted by starting on 8 an 16 bit home computers, the magic of Amiga and OS/2, before getting into UNIX via Xenix. The wonderful dungeon of the university library did the rest, showing me all the alternative universe. It also helped my university was keen into teaching the ways of Smalltalk, Lisp, ML, Prolog, Oberon, in addition to classical UNIX lectures. I was really lucky in that regard.