My early career involved compiling a lot of software that would have been better run on Linux or some BSD variant for AIX. I can confirm that building stuff like a custom Apache stack on AIX (don’t ask) was like pulling teeth using XLC.

I’m not really old enough to be an actual grey beard, but I got just enough hands-on experience with late-period Big Commercial Unix to feel like I at least swept floors and fetched coffee in the exclusive club. Cool, even if it was frustrating at times.

I guess that is the thing: we’ve settled into a monoculture that makes me deeply uncomfortable. NeXT won the desktop, but there’s only implementation. And Linux won the server. But in the meantime, I feel like only OpenBSD is credibly providing public infrastructure that everyone uses.

I kind of worry that we’re heading toward a world in which nobody really understands the guts of the systems that sit underneath modern cloud / containerized services. Furthermore, because that stuff isn’t as exciting as the Javascript framework de jure, the amount of innovation happening in the lower layers is nonexistent.