But, again, we had Plan 9. It was great and went nowhere. We had Lisp machines, Smalltalk and Oberon. All of them insanely ahead of their (and perhaps our) time and insanely cool. I can see we couldn't make anything better than Unix. What makes me ashamed is that we should be able to do it and I can't quite grasp why.
Eh, probably some variation of the "good enough" principle. It's hard to get people to switch to something better if it's "only" an evolution, not a revolution.
But that's the point. There were revolutions. Plan 9 was one. Lisp machines were another - an entire environment written in Lisp from top to bottom, as were the Smalltalk machines Xerox built. We had plenty of revolutions after Unix.
OTOH, Lisp is still going strong and regaining lots of followers. Maybe the folks at Bell Labs accidentally hit a local maximum in the OS space...
But I still think we should understand what really happened.
But cool, nevertheless.
I am a bit ashamed the coolest operating systems on the market today are either Unix-derived/inspired or a lame rehash of VMS.
There is something wrong with this.