notes-howDoWeGetToPlan9

there are plenty of alternative operating systems trying to succeed Linux and Unix systems, such as Plan 9, but none of them show signs of catching on. Are we stuck with what we currently have forever? I know nothing about this stuff, but I assume there were at least a few things that are suboptimal about the way things were done when Unix was invented. It's disappointing to imagine that we may never make progress beyond the present day.

I remember reading a quote somewhere by someone working on Plan 9 who said that Plan 9's native interface was nice and small, but most of the effort goes into writing the much larger backwards-compatibility layer that makes it POSIX-compatible.