Had that happened we wouldn't be wasting so much hardware today (old smartphones/tablets/laptops/etc.) but could have leveraged it all in a unified private network. Every single computer in my home would be now part of a distributed computing platform managed by a distributed OS.
The irony is that today the entire Cloud architecture viz. Docker, Kubernetes, REST etc. frameworks are actually recreating the above design!
And the open source cloud is a way for COMPANIES to collaborate, not people.
On the other hand, I would say there are still technical and fundamental reasons we're not using something like Plan 9, not just economic ones:
- Plan 9 was designed for LANs, not WANs. HTTP became the protocol of WANs, and the protocol of a (load balanced) client-server architecture, rather than something more peer-to-peer. So I believe that any of the systems you mentioned wouldn't be deployable that widely.
For instance, there's the NAT forwarding issue, and the fact that network deployment mechanisms like captive portals at hotels had to arise, which would limit a more peer-to-peer architecture.
(Though it's true that k8s is almost always deployed within a single fast cloud network.)
- The software world moves fast, and upgrading and compatibility are fundamentally hard problems. The cloud providers pay armies of SREs a lot of money to do this. The result is not what I like, but I have to admit they do a better job than what I do for self-hosted services!
So centralization does have inherent technical advantages. I'd like to think that there's some way around that :-)
---
A related point is that Apple invested in Bonjour / zeroconf back in the day, but I feel like a lot of the functionality and mindshare has been lost to the cloud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_(software)
I guess I do use this with Linux now! But in my case, it's fairly bare bones and doesn't feel that robust / debuggable. I'm curious what people with large, robust local networks do for naming.