What a ridiculous statement. Yeah if it was possible to just jump to the best solution each time then we'd benefit massively, but that's not how any science works. The new awesome thing is always built on the back of what was done before. Electric cars have been around since the inception of the internal combustion engine but we didn't have electrical supplies with the energy density of gasoline to make electric cars possible until decades later, and modern life would've been (and remains, unfortunately) impossible without the energy density of fossil fuels. Hopefully someday we'll get past that, but when that happens, that doesn't then mean that fossil fuels were just a bad idea, they were the only stepping stone to what replaced them.

"Unix was never a good design"

Nothing's perfect. Unix was a great design that served its purpose well for a long time, and evolved a bit along the way. Saying it was "never good" is trivializing and, in my opinion, arrogant.

Yeah, Unix was a terrible design. Composable architecture combined with standardized i/o and IPC models. I can't imagine anything worse, especially compared to today's proliferation of data formats and inscrutable APIs.

It's a good thing nobody uses it anymore.

Which is why we have Windows with the NT family of kernels. It's a reimagining that contains great ideas like a flexible file system stack that allows you to dynamically add drivers that add encryption, compression, antivirus checks etc, and a few bad ideas like a flexible file system stack that's orders of magnitude slower when working with small files than unix implementations.

Windows is a mainstream OS that is very different from Unix in many regards (even if it still has files). And it really shows that the grass isn't greener on the other side: some parts are great, some parts are terrible, but there aren't a lot of things that offer a universally better tradeoff.

UNIX was a great design for a wide range of people. FOr example, multiple domains of science were transformed because UNIX made it easy to implement microcomputers for data collection on realtime data and share the resulting software among a pool of other researchers.

There are only two kinds of OS: the ones people complain about, and the ones no one uses.

Would you care to elaborate why Unix, in your opinion, was never a good design?