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> License Windows NT from Microsoft and bolt a Mac-like interface onto it.

Gosh, am I glad that that didn't happen. I wonder how serious of an option that really was, it seems wildly out of place compared to the other propositions, which are all reasonable.

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Apple bolted Carbon APIs onto NeXTSTEP/Mach, and Microsoft bolted the OS/2 Presentation Manager onto NT (https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/05/19/presentation-manager-for...), so I'm not sure why bolting Carbon onto NT would be unreasonable.

IIRC from reading Showstopper, NT was intended to afford that sort of different frontend swapping. It just happened that Windows became the primary focus in the end.

It might have been necessary to stick with the NT 3.51 codebase. I think they broke the clean separation of the GUI from the rest of the OS in 4.0, which was launched that year, for performance reasons.

Google for Mac OS X Server 1.0 screenshots... the UI was a bizarre mashup of classic Mac OS and NeXTSTEP, you can see they were part way through bolting a Mac-like interface on.

When Mac OS X was eventually released it looked utterly different.

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