With AI I feel like a lot of these bygone-era OS's could see a whole new ecosystem of modern apps within a very short period of time.
At this point, they could likely decompile MacOS classic and rework it to give it modern memory protection, virtual memory, preemptive multitasking, and networking.
I assume booting an OS with a mere few megabytes of RAM footprint would only take milliseconds?
I've a wild whim to try this with Windows 95. What's an x11 or wayland? we're going EXPLORER.EXE!
It had most if not all of that.
It had networking from the start with AppleTalk, later Ethernet and internet with MacTCP.
MacOS 9 had a preemptively scheduled kernel.
The problem is having that and supporting the software ecosystem, which depended on cooperative scheduling without having memory protection.
MacOS 9 ‘solved’ that by running the classic OS in a single process. It had APIs for creating preemptively scheduled threads, but those threads were limited in what they could do.
You are describing attributes of the NeXT-based OS X but calling it MacOS 9.
MacOS 9 was the final version of Classic. No preemption, weak virtual memory, weak cooperative multitasking, no virtual machines for anything.
MacOS 9 is the OS that ran inside the Blue Box on Mac OS X for backwards compatibility.
Now imagine macOS progressing to the point where title bars have been replaced with toolbars, and buttons no longer have borders, so you have to guess what part of the window will drag it.
:-|
I remember using the fluxbox wm like this back on the university Sun machines
Granted it was already Windows 10, so nothing that original.
I loved the tabs on BeOS.
And yes I know it's not really a linux specific thing, but that gets the point across. It is very common on linux. I could twirl my os/desktop hipster mustache and say "my obsd/spectrwm desktop handles no window chrome really well" but then I feel really pretentious instead of only slightly.
Speaking of which. It is not a Linux solution but stock X11 twm window manager features dating back into 1988, i.e.:
NoTitle
BorderWidth 0
Button1 = m4 : window : f.move
Button3 = m4 : window : f.resize
[0] m4 stands for the Mod4 modifier, now commonly assigned to the Super/Windows key. The equivalent 1988 configuration would have used m (Meta), since the original binding syntax supported Shift, Control and Meta only.
I wish that there was some edict from KDE Project management telling everyone working on the Plasma desktop to spend a week in Haiku or something.
The amount of indirect "open a dialog box, click 6 tabs down, then enter a value" stuff in KDE that is a single drag in Haiku drives me mad.
GNOME 3 was trying to built a clean modern minimalist desktop without all the clutter inherited from the design of Windows... But all they know is, very visibly, Windows and KDE.
RISC OS is that clean legacy free desktop. It's unlike anything else, built from scratch by a team not interested in what the rest of the world was doing.
And it's still alive and still updated and works well on modern hardware. Several separate efforts are building 64-bit replacements today.
Beyond that, I'm not sure if buying Be would have fixed the managerial problems at Apple. Would they have been able to add the required features to BeOS to turn it into a production OS without the project turning into another Copland? Would the existing Apple management have slimmed down the massive Apple product line that had dozens of nearly identical models? Would it have gotten rid of dead-end projects like Newton and Pippin? Etc.
Jobs is what makes or breaks Apple in that critical period. I didn't like him but that's relevant to the success of the company. JLG did not have whatever it was Jobs gave the company.
32-bit Haiku can run old Be apps, but must be built with ancient GCC.
64-bit Haiku is built with modern GCC but it is not binary compatible with old BeOS.
We paid Cygnus(?) millions for that. The multiple virtual inheritance needed for MediaKit was a real joy to get working.
https://www.youtube.com/@designedinca
(Specifically they talk about Be beginning: https://youtu.be/5IFxwnXASyQ)
If not, desktop computing would be taken over by C++ as main systems programming language, and UNIX like computing relegated to servers.
In the places where there's something entirely different going on, such as networking in earlier BeOS, it's trash and you'd obviously want to throw it away and do what Unix did - Be were doing so. So a hypothetical turn of the century fruit-flavour BeOS is probably much closer to "Unix with a different UI" than you're thinking. NeXT changed nothing there.
The amount of work done by Haiku to provide a proper POSIX userspace support proves the point.
1. The Rhapsody developer previews, which are NeXTstep with a menu bar at the top and desktop icons, and a Platinum skin.
2. Mac OS X Server 1.x which has cascading finder windows, an icon view by default, and some other things much like that.
3. Mac OS X 10.0, which I used, or tried to use, as a daily driver, with a broadly Mac-like experience with an Apple menu, but with app names next to it containing global "about" and "quit" options, and so on.
It never did acquire any of the nice stuff that came in with System 7 (e.g. drag-and-drop customisable Apple menu stored in folders in the System Folder) or MacOS 8 (e.g. folder drawers that shrink to tabs).
The original Nike store in NYC purchased one to do their signage media playback. It didn’t go well.
I was installing GNOME pieces compiling from source, on top of Sun Solaris. So it was a weird configuration. But FWIW I relied on the tabs a lot.
I seem to recall that you could hold down Alt key and drag the tab horizontally. So a tab could stick up anywhere along the top of the window frame. The SPARCStations had three-button mice, and this might have been mapped to middle or right mouse button.
The tabbed interface features the ability to gather windows into tab groups. So when you are moving a window by dragging its tab, if you drag the tab next to another window's tab, the dragged window will snap to that other window's frame, the dragged window will be the selected tab and its contents displayed in the frame. Then dragging any of the tabs drags the whole set of tabs that are snapped to that frame. Click on a tab to make it the active tab displayed in the frame.
It's effectively like tabs now, but sort of inside out: tabs are managed by the windows manager and not the app. Tab groups of multiple, different apps. The app does not have to be "tab-aware" to be in a tab group, although I suppose there are events that can signal the manager to make a window the selected tab. It's just raising a window, making it frontmost. Modal dialogs can get tangled up, but it's no worse than the mess commonly accepted today.
One of the few upgrade experiences that was a discernable improvement and completely revised experience.
And while I agree that Steve Jobs and Next were the right business (and people) choice, I still mourn the loss of a much better UI (never been a fan of the Mac UI, and it's my daily at-work system).