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Be is much more like NT than OS/2 or classic Mac OS. Like NT: kernel written in C, portable, emphasis on multi-threading, robust against subsystem failures, shipped with a TCP/IP stack in the base OS. Be booted straight into the desktop but you could download software to give it a logon screen like NT4 and different users - the structures were already in place.

The current crop of operating systems may themselves be a temporary niche. The design of NT and unix are awash with single-host assumptions yet most use-cases are now networked. Consider the way that linux filesystem handles are specific to the host they are running on, rather than the grid of computers they run in. Yet we run word-processors in browsers, ssh to other host to dispatch jobs.

There is a gap for a system which has an API that feels like an operating system API, but which sits on top of a grid of computers, rather than a single host. The kernel/keeper acts as a resource-manager for CPUs and memory in the grid. Such systems exist in sophisticated companies but not in the mainstream. Apache Yarn is an example of a system headed in that direction.

Once such a system becomes mainstream, you don't need the kind of complex operating systems we have now. A viable OS would do far less - coordinate drivers, scheduler, TCP/IP stack.

Yeah, we cannot see very far into the future and betting that system software will remain stagnate is not a good bet. If that means wholesale replacement, few of us will understand it at first. Otherwise retrofits will remain the norm for example one old idea that seems to be on the up and up is hardware-enforced capability systems and those working on them have found plausible ways to retain most of the existing C ABI world. Whether it always remains a good idea to continue propping up the past is one of the hardest questions and ultimately will be more of an economic one.

There are obsolete systems that meet your criteria, Plan 9 and Apollo Domain/OS had plausible early answers for networked computing that haven't been adequately explored.

For your last point, I would say scheduling, security, namespacing are the core features and everything else can be layered (perhaps interchangeably) on top. As a practical example, even in monolithic FreeBSD it supports fully runtime swappable TCP/IP stacks and out of tree network stacks.. the core illusion for that system is retaining the same Socket interface for userspace. Presumably if you get the namespacing thing right the entire system and network of things would look a lot more like deliberately interchangeable parts.

Had not heard of Apollo, an interesting read. I am building a 9P library at the moment towards some projects in this spirit.

You make a good case for base features in your last paragraph. I think monolith drivers as well. Raw speed seems to be important for survival in computing platforms. I am far from a domain expert but as far as I know, monolith drivers have efficiency/speed advantages over microkernel.

That “niche” you described was actually a desktop computing norm form more than a decade.

Let’s also not forget RISC OS, Atari TOS, AmigaOS, GEOS, SkyOS and numerous DOS frontends including, but not limited to, Microsoft Windows.

Isn't Windows more abstract than just a frontend[0]? I.e., Windows/386 added protected mode and other features.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows#Early_versio...

To be honest I was being flippant with that Windows remark but you’re right to call me out for it.

Microsoft get a lot of stick but Windows of the 90s do bring a lot to table. And by 9x DOS was basically a boot loader.

Yeah, this was a common misconception - due to the fact you could boot into Windows (up to 95) from DOS, people assumed it was just a frontend program.

Not just up to 95, you could boot into Windows ME from DOS too.

But I agree that DOS was effectively just a bootloader for the 9x era of Windows. I was just being flippant in my previous post however you guys are right to call me on it.

I believe we are obliquely agreeing.

To further my thoughts a bit, the distinction I would place on OS/2 over DOS is double: 1) first class memory protection 2) full preemptive multitasking. The distinction I would place against all widely used modern desktop OSes is the lack of first class multi-user support.

Early Windows gains cooperative multi-tasking like Mac OS classic but neither fundamentally use memory protection the way later OSes normalize and that turns out to be a pretty clear dead end. I believe there are extensions for both that retrofit protection in. Both also have some add on approaches to multi-user but are not first class designs.

So, even the most robust single user system that implements full memory protection and preemptive multitasking still seems to be stuck in a valley. I.e. whatever the actual cost in terms of implementation and increase in cognitive workload for single user systems (i.e. "enter your administrative password" prompts on current macOS or Windows administrative accept dialogs) seems to be accepted by the masses.

And note that this isn't an implicit a negative judgement, for instance I find BeOS or those in your list can be absolutely fascinating. And OS/2 is lovely even today for certain niche or retrocomputing things. Just pointing out that NT made a better bet for the long term, and some of that undoubtedly related to the difference of a couple years.. keep in mind OS/2 ran on a 286, which NT completely bypassed.

Windows 2.0 for i386 was the first to introduce protected mode and preemptive multitasking. These features had to wait for Intel but it was available in 1987.

In a limited sense, yes, Windows (without NT) increasingly /used/ memory protection hardware over its life but never in a holistic approach as we typically understand today to create a TCB.

I don't believe Windows 2.0 implemented preemptive tasking, can you show a reference so I can learn?

I'm not that guy, but the Wikipedia article[1] is a decent jumping-off point, but I also found this blog article[2] talking about the different versions-- although it seems to get a couple things wrong according to discussion about it on lobste.rs[3] Finally, this long article from Another Boring Topic [4] includes several great sources.

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.0#Release_versions

2 - https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/78006.html

3 - https://lobste.rs/s/4xfswa/what_was_difference_between_windo...

4 - https://anotherboringtopic.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-micros...

That's my blog post -- thanks for the link.

The Lobsters discussion was very interesting. Some people in there were extremely knowledgeable, but also very confrontational. Coming straight in going "that's all wrong!" is not a productive way to start a discussion IMHO.

I didn't get any very firm conclusions from it. There are some very knowledgeable people out there on the WWW claiming, with convincing arguments, that Windows/286 couldn't run in 286 mode and only gave you 640kB ("conventional memory" in DOS terminology)+ 64kB HMA.

Others, including from Microsoft, say no, Windows/286 did run in protect mode and could access 16MB of (segmented) RAM.

I do not know for sure who is right.

AIUI Windows/386 2.x is basically a pre-emptive V86-mode DOS multitasker that happens to be running Windows as one of its tasks. So the GUI itself is cooperative, but between its VM and DOS VMs it can pre-empt.

(Windows 3.x 386 mode is similar, with Windows 9x stuff in the Windows VM can pre-emptively multitask, mostly).

Thanks that explanation makes sense to me!

Windows has had multi-user support for ages.

That is how user switching in XP works, and how RDP works. You can have an arbitrary number of sessions of logged in users at once, only limited by the license for what version of Windows you have installed.

There have also been versions of Windows that allow multiple users to interact with each other at once, but I believe these have all been cancelled and I do not know to what extent these simultaneous users had their own accounts.

Well of course, Windows XP is a direct decedent of Windows NT. Maybe you are referring to Citrix or Terminal Server, which are also Windows NT technologies.

Windows NT was multi-user from the start. The only change was the session object added in vista.

How dare you ignore BeOS which isn't Windows or Nix

It had already been mentioned and the point of my post was to give other examples

> And that compatibility problem was still a hard one for Microsoft to deal with, remember that NT was not ubiquitous until Windows XP despite being a massive improvement.

I think when it comes to this it is best to remember the home computing landscape of the time, and the most important part: DRAM prices.

They were absurdly high and NT4/2000 required more of it.

My assumption is Microsoft would have made the NT4/2000 jump much quicker if DRAM prices were driven in a downward direction.

I recall DRAM prices restricting the uptake of OS/2 also.

I remember talking to an IBM rep when he came to CompUSA to demo OS/2.

I asked him why I should pick OS/2 over NT and his response was "honestly, if you can afford it, NT is better"

At the time, we were selling OS/2 for $99 and NT for $499 IIRC. (And I was able to use a store copy of both to take home and use, which was awesome)

OS/2s interface was better IMO.

Definitely impactful for NT4, not for 2000.

Was very impactful in early days of 2000. Seeing 64 MiB "used up" by barely loaded NT5.0 beta/RC was honestly a sort of chilling effect. But prices shortly fell and 128MB became accessible option, just in time for Windows XP to nail Windows 9x dead

128MB was pretty common by the time Windows 2000 was released. I could afford it and I wasn’t paid well at that time.

Plus Windows ME wasn’t exactly nimble either. People talk about the disaster that was Vista and Windows 8 but ME was a thousand times worse. Thank god Windows 2000 was an option.

My understanding is that ME from a technological point of view was 98 with NT drivers. It probably was a critical step in getting vendors to make NT drivers for all of their screwball consumer hardware, and this made XP, the "move the consumers to the NT kernel" step a success. The lack of drivers is also what made XP 64 bit edition so fraught with peril, but xp-64/vista was probably critical for win7's success for the same reason.

But yeah, what a turd of a system.

98 was the one that introduced NT drivers (WDM).

Didn't it still use VXD drivers for a lot of stuff though?

Yes, because WDM support was limited. It only allowed synchronous requests and was really only suitable for USB or storage drivers.

It got much better once the release date rolled in, but it was something I remember discussed a lot at the time among those who did use NT.

Also, at the time NT was still somewhat limited in official settings to pretty much rare more expensive places and engineering systems, with typical business user keeping to Windows 98 on "client" and NT Server domain controllers or completely different vendors, at least outside big corporations with fat chequebooks. Active Directory started changing it a lot faster, the benefits wer great and 2000 having hotplug et al was great improvement, but it took until XP for the typical office computer to really run on NT in my experience.

Let’s not forget that XP had twice the system requirements that 2000 did.

I think the main difference is really just that XP had a “Home” edition that came preinstalled on home PCs.

There’s no reason Microsoft couldn’t do that with 2000, and in fact I read that some stores did stock Windows 2000 instead of Windows Me (though this wasn’t something I personally witnessed).

I'm not talking about environments that could run Home Edition - one of the things MS disabled in Home was ability to join AD domains, something that was available on 9x.

From what I recall, an important point for releasing ME at all was that compatibility (both in applications and drivers) was not yet ready at the time of NT 5.0 going gold, leading to a stopgap solution being deployed.

In my experience, offices did run Windows 2000. I also knew offices that ran NT4 too.

I guess it depends on the office though. At risk of stating the obvious: Different organisations will do things differently.

NT4 was reasonably rarer due to hardware compatibility issues as well as software compatibility. Windows 2000 brought great change there, but it only really finished with the very soon after XP.

The organizations that really needed NT for various reasons (engineering software, SMP, higher security settings, etc.) did move as early as NT4, indeed. Also, non-trivial amount of Alpha workstations with NT4 (as well as Pentium Pro ones)

It was roughly $1/MB in 1999. Or about $250 USD with inflation in 2024 dollars for a 128MB DIMM.

DOS compatibility was a far bigger issue.

PC gaming was, back then, still very DOS-centric. It wasn’t until the late 90s that games started to target Windows. And even then, people still had older games they wanted supported.

I'd say both. IIRC the DOS story was better under OS/2 than NT, but the RAM requirements were higher (at least until XP).

To add a third prong: hardware support was a big issue too as it is for any consumer OS, with legacy hardware being an issue just as it can be today if not more so. This hit both NT and OS/2 similarly.

NT 4 had NTVDM and it worked well enough. Quake 1, command and conquer, sim games for DOS and a bunch of other stuff worked just fine. You'd run into issues with timing on crappier games or some games that talked directly to soundcards I forget what the details were but you'd just not have audio.

I remember NT4 having problems with games that wanted to access SVGA resolutions and SoundBlaster. I kept a volume with Win98 back then specifically for the games.

I had a gravis ultrasound at the time and remember having to cut the reset signal line on the card.

I could then initialise the card in DOS and reboot into NT without it being reset and losing settings. Then some sketchy modified driver was able to use it.

The second system for Cutler was really Mica - he discusses its outrageous scope in his recent interview with Dave Plummer.

Link to interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi1Lq79mLeE&t=4314s - yes, it stands for New Technology)

Dave Cutler is really someone I look up to and wish I could be (but could never be due to numerous reasons). I strongly resonate with what he said in "Showstopper":

  What I really wanted to do was work on computers, not apply them to problems.

And he sticks to it for half of a century.

> This is great! It would be interesting to see darwin/macos in the mix.

But that's just another UNIX.

Only in the user's perception. The implementation is nothing like UNIX, being a Mach2.5 derivative and later additions like DriverKit.

macOS is a proper UNIX. As was OSF/1 (aka Digital UNIX aka Tru64 UNIX), which also had Mach 2.5 kernel.

So is z/OS. UNIX branding under The Open Group is correctly focused on the user's perception and has little to do with kernel implementation. Mach is is no more UNIX than NT is VMS, to call one the other in this context of kernel discussion is reductionist and impedes correct understanding of the historical roots and critical differences.

OSF/1 however was a complete Unix system, even if it based its kernel on Mach (at least partially because it offered a fast path to SMP and threading), and formed the BSD side of Unix wars.

And NeXTSTEP didn't diverge too much that when OSX was released they updated the code base with last OSFMK release.

Again, so too is z/OS a complete UNIX system (from the user perspective).

OSF/1 is decidedly not the the BSD side of the Unix wars, it is its own alternative strand against its contemporaries BSD and System V. More specifically, it took its initial UNIX personality from IBM AIX and was rapidly developed and redefined to accommodate the standards du jour which included BSD and System V APIs.

I'd say SunOS (4.x and earlier, not Solaris) was the BSD side of the Unix wars. For most of the 90's, SunOS was the gold standard for a Unix workstation. I worked at a couple of early Internet providers and the users demanded Sun systems for shell accounts. Anything else was "too weird" and would often have trouble compiling open source software.

Correct, SunOS is a descendant of BSD and was the most widely used and renowned one during that time. And like you said, it was the gold standard for easy builds of most contemporary software and enthusiastic support.

DEC Ultrix is also BSD kin and IBM AOS and HP-BSD were intentionally vanilla BSDs. There were some commercial BSDs like Mt Xinu and BSDi that were episodically relevant.

BSD proper was alive and well especially in the academic and research circles into the 1990s and we get the current derivatives like Net, Free, and Open which are direct kin.

Mach is regularly BSD-affined because BSD was a typically ported server but Mach is decidedly its own thing (as a simple and drastic counterexample, there was MkLinux and OS/2 for PowerPC which had little to do with BSD but are very much Mach). NeXTSTEP and eventually Darwin/macOS inherit BSD affinity.

Ultrix had a “weird” feeling to it. It didn’t even support shared libraries from what I remember.

It had some heavy hitters behind it, but my understanding is DEC's effort was mired in organizational problems leading to fractured strategy and commitment. Many vendors were still figuring shared libraries out into the early 1990s so it must have been swept away from Ultrix once OSF/1 became the plan of record.