Neither "purposeful omission" nor "amnesia." Rather pragmatism. Nachos,
ReactOS, QNX, and many others are left unmentioned, too. From these QNX has
been _really_ successful in the real world and it's fully POSIX. MOS is a
book for teaching the natural way to students not the (fruitless) deviation
to "hackers." Plan 9 is _for now_ a marginal player.
Just a look at how Anant Narayanan promoted his talk explains it all (and
he's a student of Tanenbaum's department):
"Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a radically new approach to operating and
distributed systems. Unencumbered by requirements such as ANSI or POSIX
compliance, the authors were able to take full advantage of modern
technology made available to us since UNIX was first conceived."
--
http://foss.in/2007/register/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=388
"Radically new?" "Unencumbered?" "Full advantage?" "Modern technology?"
Puh-lease! Microsoft had/has the largest installed base of operating
systems and the latest "technology access" and they didn't dare utter that.
Imagine this at some Microsoft developer convention: "we present here the
new version of Windows, completely 'unencumbered' by POSIX."
P.S. This was just some useless whining. A little spark. Let it die on its
own... there'll be no flames.
