Not all of the criticism in the UHH is valid IMO. About the part that is... Some of the trouble with Unix is that it doesn't follow its own principles enough. The fix for that is Plan9. Some of the trouble is "worse is better" (too simple), the fixes for that are things like nushell and capability based security systems and microkernel based, uh, kernels and other systems that demonstrate how things could be better. These don't need to stray too far from the core ideas and principles - Plan9 contains some nice demonstrations for doing more with less while being much more Unix than Unix.
Nope, it sadly remains actual in quite a few pain points, even if for various nontechenical reasons it won the server room, and embedded.
> Computer science would have progressed much further and faster if all of the time and effort that has been spent maintaining and nurturing Unix had been spent on a sounder operating system. We hope that one day Unix will be relingquished to the history books and museums of computer science as an interesting, albeit costly, footnote.
UHH is obviously sound but doesn't go far enough in criticizing the unix disaster.
The problem with Unix is that everything else is much much worse.
Lots of people have come up with fun little toy OSes, but nothing you could actually use.
Its main selling point against the 1970's competition was being available for symbolic price, alongside a commented book printout (Lion's).
Had it played by the same price rules, with a commercial license, outcome would have been much different.
Genera would like to have a word