[pjmlp]

Had it not been for UNIX taking over the Lisp workstations market, followed by the first AI winter, people would be using LispTorch today, and there wouldn't have been such a waste coming up with endless ways to speed up Python, and efforts like Mojo wouldn't even be a thing.

[Pay08]

Not really the "fault" of UNIX. The Lisp workstations would have been just as unpopular without it. They were insanely expensive and the idea of a workstation was ahead of its time, not to mention the other "unneeded" extras like GUIs, a mouse, and the photo editing and 3D modelling suites. It was plainly uneconomical.

[pjmlp]

UNIX was only cheap because AT&T was forbidden to profit from it, had it not been the case, it would have been a proprietary closed source OS, exactly at similar price points.

The proof being the graphical UNIX workstations from Cray, SGI, Sun, NeXT that came later into the market.

[Pay08]

The dimension you're missing here is that most of the Lisp OSs were single-user (AFAIK initially all of them were but some gained multi-user support later) in a period when timeshare was king. Not to mention that the hardware itself cost multiple times more to manufacture.

[pjmlp]

How many UNIX graphical workstations from Cray, SGI, Sun, NeXT do you think were multiuser in practice?

As for price, they were also not cheap to get.

[jrumbut]

You could probably say the same about any operating system, especially if you exclude the same human user operating in multiple roles.

Though in the Unix environment, additional user accounts and groups that don't actually correspond to separate humans have a lot of pragmatic uses.

[pjmlp]

Yes, however that wasn't a relevant feature for 1980-90's workstation market, like under which user the printer daemon would be running under.