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Comment by x122 | Hacker News Reader

Eh, what? At the time (1994) the handbook was written reasonably priced alternatives were MacOS and Windows, both of which froze all the time and had horrible programming environments.

AIX, non-free, was notoriously horrible, too.

And the Wirth systems that you promote here were actually free.

So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s?

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Digital Research produced some nice usable systems in the early 80s. MP/M was a multitasking version of CP/M available by 1981.

In the mainframe world, TOPS-10/20 and VMS were both exemplary. From the user POV, the former was one of the best command-line systems ever created, with none of the insane user-hostility built into UNIX command naming. Dave "VMS -> NT" Cutler absolutely hated Unix, and it shows.

But we're really comparing cinder blocks and potatoes. UNIX was designed as a hobby/student hacker tool, not as a general user OS. Many of the design choices are bizarre and frankly stupid, as the book delights in pointing out. But hackers love UNIX because using it just it feels just like hacking code, and that's considered a good thing.

It wouldn't be impossible to design an OS with powerful command line options but a sensible command naming system, much more intelligent and reliable security, a modern filesystem, and so on - and perhaps add some of the user configurability and extendability of the Lisp/Smalltalk/Hypercard(?) world.

But UNIX is so embedded now it would be a purely academic exercise.

OS/400 was also a very interesting and well designed system.

> But UNIX is so embedded now it would be a purely academic exercise

I guess I'm less pessimistic, because I don't think that's true. I think there are quite a few people like me who are fed up with the shit that exists today and really want a good alternative. I think we'd be willing to make quite a few sacrifices for something with a whole lot of potential.

What seems to be true is that there are very few people both capable of making that happen and bold enough to try to make it something people can actually use instead of just a toy academic project.

Do you blog much? I've been lurking here a lot and have seen your posts. Would be interested in long-form essays or the like on what you would like to see.

I blog a little under my actual name, but I'd rather not tie that to this identity lest it make me less willing to express my stupidest and least popular opinions here, which I feel need to be exposed to criticism so I can better judge their merit. There's a reason my handle is what it is.

So what exactly is the great stable commercial alternative in the 90s?

OS/2 was pretty solid...

The OS/2 part was, the DOS/Win comparability later not so much.

Workplace Shell was so cool though.

Not sure what was bad about the DOS and Windows compatibility? OS/2 was frequently touted as "better DOS than DOS, better Windows than Windows" and it was generally true. You could multitask DOS apps (lots of people used this for running multi-line BBSes and so forth) and Win16 apps could crash without bringing down the whole system.

Of course OS/2 was later severely hampered by its inability to run Win32 apps, but that's another story.

Besides what others already replied, universities were "free"[1] to use AT&T UNIX V source code and BSD derived code until AT&T was allowed to go commercial with UNIX, and suing Berkeley university in the process.

In fact, GCC only got traction after Sun introduced the idea in the UNIX world of selling the developer tools instead of bundling them wiht the OS.

Back in 1994 the Wirth systems were mostly only available at ETHZ.

Had Linux not come up into the scene, with the ongoing BSD lawsuit, and the UNIX landscape would have looked much different nowadays.

[1] - "free" here meaning several factors cheaper than buying a VMS or OS/360 timesharing system for the university campus.

From reading it I recall it was less about contemporary alternatives (which all sucked), and more about how UNIX displaced better environments in the 70s/80s.

There were a number of Multics descendants in the minicomputer world. Data General had AOS/VS, and Prime had PrimeOS. They were commercial and they were stable. However, they were tied to proprietary, expensive hardware.

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