This also underscores my explanation for the “worse is better” phenomenon: worse is free.

Stuff that is better designed and implemented usually costs money and comes with more restrictive licenses. It’s written by serious professionals later in their careers working full time on the project, and these are people who need to earn a living. Their employers also have to win them in a competitive market for talent. So the result is not and cannot be free (as in beer).

But free stuff spreads faster. It’s low friction. People adopt it because of license concerns, cost, avoiding lock in, etc., and so it wins long term.

Yes I’m kinda dissing the whole free Unix thing here. Unix is actually a minimal lowest common denominator OS with a lot of serious warts that we barely even see anymore because it’s so ubiquitous. We’ve stopped even imagining anything else. There were whole directions in systems research that were abandoned, though aspects live on usually in languages and runtimes like Java, Go, WASM, and the CLR.

Also note that the inverse is not true. I’m not saying that paid is always better. What I’m saying is they worse is free, better was usually paid, but some crap was also paid. But very little better stuff was free.

And incredibly responsive compared to the operatings systems of even today. Imagine that: 30 years of progress to end up behind where we were. Human input should always run at the highest priority in the system, not the lowest.