What can a "modern" OS do than something like NextSTEP absolutely cannot? Aside from the chrome, and performance-bound things like video streaming and gaming, the functionality of what we can do with computers changed very little over the decades.
> video streaming
NeXTStep had NeXTtime, which IIRC was also important in sealing the Apple deal, as Be's big claim to fame was (multi-media) performance, with the for-the-time impressive demo of 4 videos playing simultaneously. Nobody had really thought of it before, but playing 4 videos was also not an issue in NT, so Be-blocked.
https://www.paullynch.org/NeXTSTEP/AppleNeXT.htmld/present.h...
I remember NeXTtime - it was essentially a prototype tech demo that could play some -- only some -- QuickTime movies in a very small window. I find it unlikely that it was significant in the deal. IIRC the Apple tech team wasn't that impressed with the interrupt latency of Mach, which later had to be fixed at Apple out of necessity.
I recently (3 years ago) started developing on iOS and MacOS.
I learnt programming on Mac Plus in the late 1980s early 1990s
Wow, what a change. In the 1988-92 Macs were the bees knees for development. Really good.
Now, definitely not. I regularly switch between Mac, Linux, and Windows for development.
Development on iOS and MacOS is deeply painful. The tools are flash, lots of features, and they mostly work, that is they do not really work.
Apple took US$99 from me for a license to write software for their machines, and now I cannot run my software on iOS unless I am connected to the Internet, so they can "verify" my license. (I never got the license - another sad story)
Many times, regularly, the "verification" process goes awry and I spend time trying to work out which particular string of gobeldy gook I need to enter n which obscure part of Xcode to get the equipment I (my boss) paid for to do anything other than be dead weight.
The flagship language (Swift) is half arsed. Some bits are OK, but the threading model is from the 1990s dressed in drag. Memory management by reference counting? Golly, how 1990s. Passing class parameters by reference as default, but not struct parameters - say what?
Distributing the software we write to the users that need to use it is immensely painful, not my immediate problem, but I watch people in my firm tear their hair out trying to make it work.
How the mighty have fallen.
Classes are passed by reference.
I still have trauma
End users don’t use operating systems, they’re a burden of security vulnerabilities and compatibility issues.
If I had to round it out, the tech industry as a whole would prefer we all do everything in browsers over the cloud.
Disregarding freedom and privacy, I would prefer things to be that way.
Reliability too. The cloud is 99.9999 reliable until your power, therefore your internet cuts off.
Your local office, or emacs, or whatever, will gladly chug along until the M1's battery drains
Not that Im in a bad neighborhood: I just realized I might be the only one in my block that doesn't have a luxury vehicle. 8 year old Hyundai and 10 year old Golf for me in a sea of Mercs, BMW, Lariats and Lexuses.
Of course, I must be poor. I have a portable, Chinese clone 7000 kW gen that only feeds 6 circuits and sounds like a pneumatic gun. Half my neighbors have full-house automatic, natural gas fed GENERACs.
The OS(or more specifically the desktop environment) intended for a general audience will be more bland, uniform and legacy than the one made for a smaller more specific audience, perhaps it was made for the sole use of the author and they decided to share..
The general audience will have a preconceived expectation, you might say an intuition, about how the environment works, this mean, that an environment intended for such an audience cannot really have too much advancement or it will drift too far from expectation.
Support modern networking?
Support Unicode in all applications?
I don’t remember what other multihead graphics cards existed at that time. For multiple video cards, you again had to reach for Matrox, since they were produced in both PCI and AGP variants and I’m unsure about other brands.
NeXT had full ipv4 support from the start.
Unicode wasn't a thing until after Apple bought them.
One experiment I've done on my own NeXTStation turbo was run equivalent applications on both a NeXT and a modern Intel mac pro. Mathematica, email, Framemaker/affinity publisher all take roughly the same time to load and execute similar tasks.
Yes you can't do 3d, video, or AI on a 33 year old NeXT, and the image files would be smaller, but beyond that you could easily do your day to day work on such a system. It doesn't feel old at all.
I’m not negating your experience and share the same sentiments, but there is also a bit of undeniable progress modern OSes made.
One such bit is high DPI and mixed DPI support (theoretically should be easy peasy with Display PostScript, but somehow I don’t think it would pan out well in practice).
Considering that some M1 laptops didn't support multiple monitors because of the internal USB allocations, it's not like modern Macs don't have such caveats
Now Windows NT, on the other hand...
After win 7 the only innovation in windows has been incremental features mostly to upsell Microsoft services.
In practice, even if you managed, say, to port a modern Firefox and all its baggage down to OpenSSL and even GCC to compile it in a mighty for of herculean effort, it would still likely die of a thousand paper cuts anyway because quite a lot of syscalls would be expected to have evolved since.
But other modern codebases will want more modern syscalls without fallbacks and compromises (see those atomic file operations which solve some nasty vulnerabilities for an example).