I'd guess that the technical decisions that differentiated early unix from the lisp machines etc. were based on hardware and cost limitations.(the development of unix is something I'd be interested in reading more about) Then as unix took off, these technologies became entrenched, with a kind of apologetics developing amongst users who liked those systems, or never used anything else.
There's an interview with Bill Joy where he said that Vi's famous modal interface was merely a result of his poor quality terminal and network connection, and now it's used by millions of programmers. I'm not saying that these users are wrong about the benefits of modal editing or the unix text interface etc, but that these are discovered benefits that are then used to retroactively construct a containing narrative of justification that often walls people off from alternatives.
I'd also hazard a guess that many of these technologies were simply inaccessible and/or unknown to the mass of post-pc-revolution developers who create the bulk of our present systems. The number of devs who had access to Lisp machines was small compared to the number who came in with Unix with its success in the workstation market, and tiny compared to the number of devs who came in through home computers/PCs.
I myself grew up with 80s home computers, moving to the PC and Linux in the late 90's. Lisp machines, Oberon etc. were unknown to me until a few years ago, and information about them is still hard to come by. Nearly all the lisp machine sites are web 1.0 with broken links etc. Very few of them try to market the benefits of these systems to people in the wider community.
After I got interested in lisp and lisp machines (thanks pg!) I spent a weekend getting that notorious leaked Symbolics Genera distribution working on Linux, inside virtual box on my mac. After a few hours in the Listener, with its rich output and superior incremental help system I wanted to show it to everybody I knew. It was one of the most incredible things I had ever seen on a computer. For the next few weeks at work I was occupied with the constant thought, "This is not as good as Genera". It's had a huge impact on how I think about software, even my indie game development.
Hm, that's a really interesting theory, and the stories and related arguments too, thanks a lot! I didn't think of it before.
In fact, I started hearing of all of those OSes fairly recently too, but I still see myself as a "youngster" in programming world, and thus I thought those technologies were more well known at that time. Also, that they were more well known to Important Figures and Big Companies then, so they could try to build on those ideas.
But now I start to recall, that most of those OSes are usually reported to be used and deployed quite rarely (Lisp Machines e.g. often dismissed because of high price and hardware requirements), so that could have limited their exposure. And also, I'm ashamed to admit I forgot about this (oh the times!), it must be taken into account that there was no Internet at the time, so this also made sharing of ideas harder than now...
>the development of unix is something I'd be interested in reading more about
http://www.levenez.com/unix/ has a good amount of info and links on the history of Unix and the people who worked on it. I came across the site a while ago and browsed it some. Interesting stuff, some of it at least. Recursively traversing the links should give even more.
I'd guess that the technical decisions that differentiated early unix from the lisp machines etc. were based on hardware and cost limitations.(the development of unix is something I'd be interested in reading more about) Then as unix took off, these technologies became entrenched, with a kind of apologetics developing amongst users who liked those systems, or never used anything else.
There's an interview with Bill Joy where he said that Vi's famous modal interface was merely a result of his poor quality terminal and network connection, and now it's used by millions of programmers. I'm not saying that these users are wrong about the benefits of modal editing or the unix text interface etc, but that these are discovered benefits that are then used to retroactively construct a containing narrative of justification that often walls people off from alternatives.
I'd also hazard a guess that many of these technologies were simply inaccessible and/or unknown to the mass of post-pc-revolution developers who create the bulk of our present systems. The number of devs who had access to Lisp machines was small compared to the number who came in with Unix with its success in the workstation market, and tiny compared to the number of devs who came in through home computers/PCs.
I myself grew up with 80s home computers, moving to the PC and Linux in the late 90's. Lisp machines, Oberon etc. were unknown to me until a few years ago, and information about them is still hard to come by. Nearly all the lisp machine sites are web 1.0 with broken links etc. Very few of them try to market the benefits of these systems to people in the wider community.
After I got interested in lisp and lisp machines (thanks pg!) I spent a weekend getting that notorious leaked Symbolics Genera distribution working on Linux, inside virtual box on my mac. After a few hours in the Listener, with its rich output and superior incremental help system I wanted to show it to everybody I knew. It was one of the most incredible things I had ever seen on a computer. For the next few weeks at work I was occupied with the constant thought, "This is not as good as Genera". It's had a huge impact on how I think about software, even my indie game development.