"A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm, is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm" I feel the same way about societies that continue to fail lessons of history and repeat the same damaging (and often easily avoided) idiocy.

Nobody of a certain age. If you are over 35 you'll remember when they were known as a Chinese firm buying up all of the IBM Thinkpad business...

Hurd is long past ever being anything but a pet project of RMS and his familiars.

Xenix was worse, but only a little. Both it and HPUS were atrocities.

Still good enough to learn UNIX, that was my introduction back in 1993.

The system was still expensive enough that we had a single tower for the whole class, we would take turns into the system, having prepared our samples on MS-DOS using Turbo C, with mocks for the UNIX system calls and conditional makefiles.

Good riddance. Of all the Unix variants I tried over the years, HP-UX was the second worst (that dishonor goes to Xenix).

I remember giving a talk at Chico State University back in the dotcom era, and got a tour of the CS dept; they had various systems running on Solaris, AIX, etc, all with "normal" naming conventions. But anything with HPUX was named after diseases (e.g. Typhus, Malaria) and the feeling in the dept was not subtle.

Network effects and an as-yet insufficient friction to leave en masse has kept LI in a semi-moated space.

There have been competitors, but they are either niche (Zerply) or more regionally specific (Xing, with its focus on following EU data sovereignty laws) or the latest trend, AI-enabled agentic recruitment, which as yet has no real track record.

Which college?

Vera-Augustin, the two founders.

"but I got the impression that their server line was just as important."

They were far more important for the business.

Reddit was contemporary to Digg, it just survived 'better'