Some years ago, when IBM was investing gazillions of dollars into Workplace OS, it appeared that Mach might well "rule the world." If Workplace OS "succeeded," then there would be: a) A community of students learning to build MK stuff atop Mach, b) Widespread understanding of Mach-like systems, c) People porting Mach to anything looking like a reasonably modern CPU.
This of course comes in as a "win" for anyone wanting to build other stuff (like Hurd) atop Mach-like systems. Somewhat similar to the way that Linux benefited from using ISA/VLB/PCI computer hardware that was primarily designed for use with WinTel systems. If Linux had required expensive, custom-built hardware, it would have failed. Something that Linux has "shown the world" is that it's possible to make a monolithic OS kernel about as portable as they thought microkernels would be. It's turning out to be fairly straightforward to port Linux to new CPUs, given a GCC code generator. (Note that NetBSD had already established that this was plausible; Linux has the difference that intentions of portability were an afterthought...) -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] - What have you contributed towards Linux today? North Texas Linux Users Group <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
