Why Some Dead OSes Still Matter (2007) [pdf]

The differences between the other systems I mentioned (ITS, Genera, EROS) and Unix are even more striking.

Around 1996 they made a pivot. They invested heavily to recreate themselves as a company who sold services based on Windows NT. This was a desperate move, but it worked - by the late 90s they had reinvented themselves as a services business. One of the stories of the late 90s was the way that IBM had reinvented themselves.

Then, shrewdly, they invested heavily in Linux. At a time, FreeBSD was still a much better platform. But Linux had the GPL behind it. The GPL forces people to release changes. This sabotaged the commercial software market, which IBM had already lost. IBM could continue to charge for services and retain their hardware monopoly. This has hurt competitors who had strong footholds in software but who who were less strong in services (Sun, Oracle).

Unikernels are just the logical continuation of exokernels, except designed to run under a bare metal hypervisor. Though still excellent to see libOS taken to its limits, I find the task of actually turning a full workstation operating system into a secure multi-tenant distributed cluster system to be more versatile, as you could then tailor it to both general-purpose and special tasks, libOS being firmly in the latter - deploying applications.

Singularity was great, though it seems to have stagnated.

Why? When was the last time there was a Linux crash due to it not using a "safe" language? How many people did it effect? Is Linux actually measurably any the worse for using an "unsafe" language?

Would Linux be measurably any better for use of a micro-kernel?

Is anybody going to spend the man-decades (or man-centuries) necessary to re-write Linux using micro-kernels or safe languages, just to wind up at the same level of functionality? No. Ain't nobody got time for that.

So unless you can point to concrete, measurable benefits that are going to come from switching to micro-kernels or Rust or whatever, Linux is going to continue on its way. (I agree that the advantages of micro-kernels are a valid research subject. But you need more than Tannenbaum's "that's the right way to do it". You need a compelling reason where it can do something that people care about that Linux can't do, or where it can do it with much fewer resources (either hardware or programmers), or something of that sort. Merely 10% improvement, say, isn't going to cut it, because you'd have to re-write all of Linux to get that improvement, and it's not worth it.)

http://www.cpushack.com/2015/04/18/the-forgotten-ones-unisys...

There was a YouTube ad for them, too, that showed the processor and memory took up little space. Good job on that. The pricing was around $25,000 for people wanting to play with it. That was nice. Unfortunately, and predictably, they've moved onto x86 with firmware emulation:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2364600/unisys-phasing-out-de...

Not sure if that's a mainframe box or not. Has a nice case that reminds me of Alienware. Anyway, now MCP runs on Libra's which are $900,000 entry-level. Wasn't crap on eBay for the older stuff. (sighs)

I'd be concerned about buying one given the complexity of mainframes. I tried to acquire an old AS/400 to play with only to find that there were a myriad of strangely-named options that probably weren't options. I surely found all for sale. It take an expert, though, to know what to buy, how to put it together, and so on. Unless I wanted to sift through encyclopedias. Is acquiring Unisys Micro-A's etc like that where I'd definitely need an expert rather than just the documentation?

Not to mention the fact that ssh has existed for plan 9 for as long as there has been ssh. Plan 9 is older than ssh. Plan 9 also supported rsh and all the other awful unix communications protocols. They never gained popularity with plan 9 users because superior alternatives existed, which made better use of the OS abilities.