

Andy Tanenbaum hasn't learned anything  - vinutheraj
http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/andy_tanenbaum

======
beza1e1
17 years later:

Plan9 is going nowhere. That commercial spin off Vita Nuovo
(<http://www.vitanuova.com/>) is quiet. The Linux and Solaris monolithic
kernels are still strong.

Minix3 doesn't really progress (<http://groups.google.com/group/minix3>). The
L4 microkernel is commercially successful (<http://www.ok-labs.com/>).

~~~
vinutheraj
Does commercial success or popularity imply technically sound and superior ?

~~~
SwellJoe
In the case of UNIX, it's not _merely_ commercial success and popularity. It
is the choice of a large portion of the smartest people working in technology.
If we were talking about success amongst the hoi palloi (like, say, Windows),
then your point would stand...but we're not. UNIX has seen its fortunes
flounder and flourish multiple times over the span of 30+ years, and yet,
today, UNIX runs the most important technologies on earth (Google, Amazon, the
majority of all other web applications, the best smart phones, most smart
devices with anything more powerful than a simple microcontroller, and a whole
lot more), because the people building them chose UNIX.

So, is UNIX technically sound and superior? In the general case, I would say,
unequivocally, yes.

~~~
shalmanese
It seems like almost all of this can be attributed to path dependence rather
than technological superiority.

~~~
praptak
Path dependence in case of Google, Amazon, smartphones, websites? What kind of
'path' did they have behind them that would make them unix-dependent?

------
ilyak
I hate hardware.

Hardware is the thing that prevents microkernels with carefully distributed
functions.

But hardware is still land where dragons are, therefore you have to do
everything with it in kernel-space (it's unsafe and isn't delegatable mostly).

If hardware would soon die and we'd be programming on the turing machine, we'd
get microkernel OSes in no time!

~~~
mseebach
> If hardware would soon die and we'd be programming on the turing machine,
> we'd get microkernel OSes in no time!

That'd be da bomb.

~~~
rbanffy
> "in no time"

> That'd be da bomb.

Actually, it would be a singularity.

------
ilyak
"Name a product that succeeds by running UNIX as an application." Hmhm, Xen? I
think I'd name quite a few.

~~~
Confusion
That existed in 1992?

~~~
amalcon
VMWare did...

