[bitofhope]

The Handbook is a fine document and any computing history fan worth their salt should read it, but it's hardly the best analysis of Unix in a historical perspective.

Blaming (or crediting, however you want to think about it) GNU for proliferation of Unix is anachronistic. RMS has repeatedly said he doesn't care for the design of Unix, but he chose it for the ease of implementation. GNU wasn't even bootable as a stand-alone OS before 1990s and certainly not production ready until Linux was. Using GNU utilities in proprietary Unices was popular, at least since the 90s, but I never heard anyone consider them a "killer app" for Unix.

[pjmlp]

I used to have a couple of PC World articles about Windows winning the Workstation market, until about GNU/Linux started to be mature enough to allow easy porting of commercial UNIX stuff into them.

Had Microsoft and IBM kept serious about their POSIX compatibility subsystems instead of a bullet point to win government contracts, and history would have played out much differently.