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by Isamu
2522 days ago
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The same people built Plan 9 and learned from their experience building Unix to make an operating system that was like Unix, only more so. But Unix was originally built under the Bell System monopoly and they were restricted from selling it, and it wasn't developed as an actual product anyway (Ken was basically disobeying his manager in developing it) so they gave it away free, with source code, to whoever requested it (mostly universities. Early distributions on magtape reportedly included the note "Love, from Ken.") Plan 9 was post-monopoly, so it was a "PRODUCT" and marketed with various licensing restrictions and you had to pay for it (with maybe a by-seat pricing? Can't remember.) And by then it was competing with all kinds of OFFICIAL Unix variants with real support offered, plus MS-DOS and the first Windows, and also Apple was in the mix. People didn't get the point of an operating system that made good use of a network that most people didn't use at that time. And compute servers? What is that all about? It just didn't resonate with anybody at the time, although it provided all the abstractions we tend to care about more now. |
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IBM developed the PC with an open architecture and it took off.
IBM realized it didn't control things enough, so it released the PS/2 with the microchannel bus and OS/2 and...
nobody cared.