What helped Unix succeed was that originally Bell Labs wasn't allowed to sell it, so they gave it to universities for what was a symbolic price in comparisasion what a standard OS used to cost, alongside its source code.
So naturally many stundents from those universities went out and started businesses based on UNIX, like Sun for example.
One of the reasons behing the BSD lawsuit was that AT&T got the license to charge for UNIX after Bell Labs was broken down into smaller units and they were trying to kill off those free branches.
People have a tendency to gravitate towards free stuff regarless how bad the quality happens to be.
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?
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.
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.
OS/2 was pretty solid...
Workplace Shell was so cool though.
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.
Where does the MS operating system fit in here? Arguably the worst general-computing OS, but by far the most popular. For purpose of discussion, do you consider it free due to being widely pirated?
I'll say that the developer experience on Windows was excellent around the 1995-2005 timeframe. But the user experience was horrible, yet it remained an almost monopoly on the desktop.
Obviously it’s great in a VM!
Regular consumers just handle their computers like appliances, getting a new one with whatever OS it gets bundled with.
The monopoly worked both ways, any OEM was free to ditch Microsoft agreements, they just cared to improve their profits by getting into bed with Microsoft.
