alt Hacker NewsYou point to a better timeline. Sometimes—when desperately alone—I imagine.
If only the guy who was destined to close a disk operating system deal with IBM hadn’t been goofing around with his plane that fateful day.
We would all be using lisp machines, running smalltalk on microkernels that put the HURD to shame. Just imagine: instead of backslashes and drive letters, we’d have parens. Endless, syntactically-valid parens.
Or CP/M, probably that. But can it run doom?
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That's not at all how it went down.
Please don't spread lies about Gary.
> using lisp machines, running smalltalk on microkernels that put the HURD to shame
That future is not different from this future. That road leads down to Javascript and React anyways. (Perhaps with a slightly different syntax.)
sigh .. and SGI would've been the ones to make the killer laptop which morphed into a slick metal pocket dependency for billions ...
Glad that at least we avoided that much more parentheses.
Where is our PL any kind of bracket and other rococo ornamental symbol is at most totally optional?
Sorry to break it to you, but on that timeline, the good things got poisoned. IBM enhanced Lisp with Enterprise Ready features like Spreadsheet Macro Builder, Microsoft took over development of Smalltalk and morphed it into BASIC 2.0, and the HURD community lost a bizarre copyright lawsuit. Fortunately for those folks, an intrepid hacker in the 90s saw some of the interesting ideas in MS-DOS and rebuilt it as LS-DOS. Today, most of their servers and mobile phones run LS-DOS or similar.