I see Unix (or today Linux) as currently without any alternative. And it's an OK-ish OS by now. I'm using it for over 20 years as the only thing that's allowed to touch hardware.
Still I don't think that it has "won" because it's amazing on the tech level. It really isn't!
It's a big hack. With ridiculously stupid / primitive ideas behind it. (Just to name one of my favorite elephants in the room: A stream of "chars"—whatever a "char" is—is a "data format"? Even a "universal" one? Alone saying such things out loud is absurdly foolish, imho).
But by now legends have formed around the whole story. Most of the "Unix philosophy" for example is a post-hoc invention by people who have some strong urge to "look smart" in retrospective…
The truth is Unix started as a toy without any serous planing behind it. But than business discovered it by chance, and business came to to the conclusion that "a Bobbycar is good enough" as long as it doesn't cost anything. Business is never interested in excellent technical solutions! It's always only interested in "the cheapest shit that gets the job done"™ (barely). Unix fits this pattern very well.
A small reminder where we're still standing mostly:
Still I don't think that it has "won" because it's amazing on the tech level. It really isn't!
It's a big hack. With ridiculously stupid / primitive ideas behind it. (Just to name one of my favorite elephants in the room: A stream of "chars"—whatever a "char" is—is a "data format"? Even a "universal" one? Alone saying such things out loud is absurdly foolish, imho).
But by now legends have formed around the whole story. Most of the "Unix philosophy" for example is a post-hoc invention by people who have some strong urge to "look smart" in retrospective…
The truth is Unix started as a toy without any serous planing behind it. But than business discovered it by chance, and business came to to the conclusion that "a Bobbycar is good enough" as long as it doesn't cost anything. Business is never interested in excellent technical solutions! It's always only interested in "the cheapest shit that gets the job done"™ (barely). Unix fits this pattern very well.
A small reminder where we're still standing mostly:
https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf