I mean, what if Linus hadn't posted what he did when he did about his little "toy" OS, and what if several others hadn't started sending patches? I know what y

I mean, what if Linus hadn't posted what he did when he did about his little "toy" OS, and what if several others hadn't started sending patches? I know what you mean but I think we have to remember that this was when BSD was being hit up with legal threats from AT&T that eventually went nowhere and the GNU folks were quite busy. I know HURD is considered the Duke Nukem of kernels now but I have to imagine that if not for Linus we'd either be using BSD a lot more than we do or that GNU or some other hypothetical player would have implemented a free kernel to run GNU on top of. But you're right on, it's amazing anyone made any progress on Unix during the Dark Ages described in the article...