I'm glad you brought Sprite up. Been meaning to look at it closely. Far as Amboeba vs Plan 9, that was intentional on my part: get HN readers seeing something a bit different that happened in the same field. Probably just phrased the comment badly again (sigh).
Edit to add: The retrospective is definitely worth reading. I think most administrators, to this day, have it harder in some ways than people running Sprite due to their clever design choices in networking, storage, and single-system-image.
Sprite homepage for HN readers following along:
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/sprite/spr...
Edit to add: The retrospective is definitely worth reading. I think most administrators, to this day, have it harder in some ways than people running Sprite due to their clever design choices in networking, storage, and single-system-image.