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So does BSD though. To my mind it's accidents of history (in particular the AT&T lawsuit) that lead to Linux being the thing, and if it hadn't been Linux it would've been something else. (Indeed I believe Torvalds said that if 386BSD had been going around Helsinki at the time there would never have been a Linux).

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True. If it wasn't for the license war between AT&T and BSD we would live in a parallel universe where everyone is running FreeBSD everywhere.

Kind of cool how randomness creates forks in time.

Absolutely true about the war that lead to the Linux mainstreaming.

And btw, is there a list of such points in computing history, where a slightly small change in a decision would have lead to a different computing environment ( i.e. "forks in time") ? This would be a very good read. And a nice practical introduction of chaos theory.

One such moment was when IBM decided to sign the deal with Microsoft, giving them exclusive license on operating systems for IBM PC. As someone put it: Were there one person with a brain at IBM to proof-read that deal, Microsoft would never become such a big company as it is today. But there wasn't any, so we ended up with Windows at 95% of PCs worldwide.

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