But, again, we had Plan 9. It was great and went nowhere. We had Lisp machines, Smalltalk and Oberon. All of them insanely ahead of their (and perhaps our) time and insanely cool. I can see we couldn't make anything better than Unix. What makes me ashamed is that we should be able to do it and I can't quite grasp why.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy#Quotes