I'm not convinced Ethernet and ATM are going for entirely the same markets. I've never heard of SOHO ATM, at any rate. Really, Ethernet faced off with Token Ring, which has good features (guaranteed bandwidth, for one) compared to unswitched Ethernet, which is pretty much a dead technology at this point.
> Linux/SysV
Linux isn't System V, it's POSIX. That sounds like a cop-out, but Linux, one, has no code from any System V systems, and, two, doesn't feel like System V. If anything, it feels like GNU, which is a lot more featureful than System V ever was. (Compare Solaris to most Linux distros, for example.) And if we're going to say System V... well, the BSDs still exist, and Solaris was the last of the classic System V OSes in anything like widespread use. And even Solaris/SunOS wasn't pure System V, was it?
> The x86 instruction set.
Making good use of cache turned out to be much more important than ease of decoding, and having a Huffman-coded machine code is a good way to do that. Plus, the x86 ISA isn't weird in some ways the RISC ISAs which tried to displace it were: It has no branch delay slots, it has multiplication and division opcodes which work like normal opcodes, it can load immediates into a register without a lot of contortion, it's reasonably friendly to unaligned memory accesses... Really, x86 is only bad in a rather narrow analysis.
I'm not convinced Ethernet and ATM are going for entirely the same markets. I've never heard of SOHO ATM, at any rate. Really, Ethernet faced off with Token Ring, which has good features (guaranteed bandwidth, for one) compared to unswitched Ethernet, which is pretty much a dead technology at this point.
> Linux/SysV
Linux isn't System V, it's POSIX. That sounds like a cop-out, but Linux, one, has no code from any System V systems, and, two, doesn't feel like System V. If anything, it feels like GNU, which is a lot more featureful than System V ever was. (Compare Solaris to most Linux distros, for example.) And if we're going to say System V... well, the BSDs still exist, and Solaris was the last of the classic System V OSes in anything like widespread use. And even Solaris/SunOS wasn't pure System V, was it?
> The x86 instruction set.
Making good use of cache turned out to be much more important than ease of decoding, and having a Huffman-coded machine code is a good way to do that. Plus, the x86 ISA isn't weird in some ways the RISC ISAs which tried to displace it were: It has no branch delay slots, it has multiplication and division opcodes which work like normal opcodes, it can load immediates into a register without a lot of contortion, it's reasonably friendly to unaligned memory accesses... Really, x86 is only bad in a rather narrow analysis.