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I found this essay to be fairly comprehensive, accurate, and informative; some of the items mentioned I have little experience or knowledge of - or didn't even know existed (BGP, for instance, was new to me).

I think the author's heart is in the right place, and I would love to hope to see some of the ideas espoused in the essay come to fruition - but I think that the momentum of history may be difficult to overcome (much like tiling window managers are now popular with some people - though IIRC, Windows 1.0 was a tiling system, then for some reason switched to overlapping windows - perhaps as a result of singular lower-resolution displays being the norm). The author mentions LISP and some other programming languages trying to be an OS, but failing to gain hold commercially for various reasons (though in LISP's case, one could argue Symbolics did succeed to an extent?).

This essay certainly is "food for thought", and I plan to re-read it and think about it; I'd love to see it expanded to book form (or some other format to explore the subject in a deeper manner).

Kudos to the author.




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