You wrote:
The only real barrier left to UNIX becoming the OS of choice is commercial app support (things like word processors and etc. becoming readily available and inexpensive).
I don't mean to toss gasoline onto this fire, but...... Unix as we know has a vanishingly small probability of ever becoming 'mainstream'. There's a two-orders-of-magnitude gap between the installed base of Dos/Windows and that of Unix. That gap has grown, not marrowed over time. This is however no reflection on the obvious technical merits of Unix. Market dominance is based not on technical superiority, but rather on technical sufficiency. Once an OS acheives technical sufficiency any further technical improvements will have a diminishing marginal effect on that OS's market performance. Once the OS is technically sufficient, non-technical factors begin to dominate. The market failure of WinNT is a classic example of this. Its failure is unrelated to its technical merits (or lack thereof), but rather on econmic and social factors the even a company withe the marketing muscle of MicroSoft has not yet been able to overcome. (OS/2 is of course an example of an even more dismal, perhaps terminal, failure for many of the same reasons.) Dale H.