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Comment by scruffyherder | Hacker News Reader

not really, the exe's are a.out so it's more like EMX. It's broken up like services more like HURD, and extended to 32bit on Win16.

It's far more cooler being able to run on Windows 3.1

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Sure, but from a user perspective? It says you could run vi/gcc/etc. in BoW, which you can easily do. I don't know why GGP would want to spend millions (surely would cost way more than millions) nor billions recreating something that already exists?

Really, to do something different and that might move the needle to new possibilities. The *BSDs and Linux seem like they permanently miss just a few core elements to be mass adoptable. Mass adoption would benefit everyone through things like competition but also just different features. Like imagine being able to zfs send incremental backups of your daily drivers and gaming boxes. Or if plan9 had really taken off and had real market share. Idk, just feels like we've been stuck in a place for the last few decades.

You are using plan9's UTF8 and 9p in lots of products.

You're looking too close to the trees gcc/vi instead of the BSD forest.

BOW's only weakness is its single user mode, more so a limitation of being a Win16. If it'd been pushed harder to a NT service/client/server DLL it'd have been a much bigger player.

It's all moot, Pink/taligent died, Virtual Machines is where everyone runs their stuff these days, OS/2 had the driver/disk/filesystem stuff done right.

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