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Comment by the_only_law | Hacker News Reader

The more I read about some of the operating systems eventually died out (mostly), the more disappointed I am that the only realistic options for workstation/server OS’s are Windows and a handful of Unix-like systems.

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Doing the first 90% of an operating system is pretty straightforward. Doing fun demos with it is fun. But Microsoft is severely underrated for its incredible skill in, and ability to put massive resources behind, the last 10%. That includes stuff like device drivers, getting hundreds of thousands of disparate components to work together, supporting hundreds of file formats, working with a gigantic landscape of vendors, 35 years of compatibility, and so forth. Microsoft is the only reason you and I can buy a perfectly capable laptop for $500.

And Linux is the only reason I can buy a perfectly capable laptop for $100.

I would be very curious to see a list of features which were available in defunct OSes that are not available or only available via kludge these days. There are some great ideas still out there in the wild.

BFS (the BeOS File System) had very cool features, especially for the time (see https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/the-b...):

- 64-bit, journaled, UTF-8 capable, extended attributes: things that are standard today but novel at the time

- It had "live queries" meaning feeds into file changes. AFAIK only NTFS has that today with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USN_Journal. Inotify is a hack: have you tried monitoring your root folder ?

Have a look at Multics and what Unix missed out implementing. VMS also really interesting. And for sure Plan9.

AmigaOS had (well, has, but it's pretty much defunct) a lot of interesting things such as ARexx, DataTypes, Assigns and a standardized software installer.

I've heard wonders of Lisp OSes, but haven't tried one.

Interlisp/Medley has sort of revived as an application that runs on your computer: https://interlisp.org/

There’s also Mezzano which is a relatively new, from scratch Common Lisp implementation on bare metal: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

Finally, if you know where to look, it’s possible to setup a Symbolics VM on Linux, which is somewhat interesting to poke around in (all the manuals available out of the box are pretty interesting to read through.)

My Linux-fu might just be to weak but I haven't yet managed to get the Symbolics VM to run. I was wondering, if there exists a Linux VM were someone already got it to work or if you could do it inside a container?

It just seems really cumbersome and that is a shame, because it seems so worth to take a look at it.

Oh wow, another retro computing system I now need to go exploring.

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