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Forgotten Systems! UNIX being a good thing is commonly taken as axiomatic. I don't particularly think it is; if anything, Unix's extreme minimalism and inconsistent design was destructive to the work that was being done in the 1960s and 1970s on advanced, feature-rich hardware and operating systems oriented toward high-level languages and high reliability. I'll probably expand this page at some point, but this is a quick list of the ones that are important to me. ------------------------------- --- Burroughs Large Systems --- ------------------------------- The Burroughs B5000 was a high-level mainframe with tagged memory and a pure HLL OS (there was literally no assembler on the platform) in 1961. Buffer overflows were architecturally impossible. Some design decisions have aged poorly - the decision to make floating-point values the fundamental data type on the system, for instance - but B5000 influenced all later descriptor and capability systems. Burroughs Large Systems was a successful family and is still in widespread use today, although Unisys moved the product line to emulation in the mid 2010s. -------------------------- --- IBM S/38 and IBM i --- -------------------------- The S/38 and the (compatible) AS/400 that succeeded it have all the guts of a well-designed object-oriented descriptor architecture and are commercially successful, with over 100000 customer sites. A flat 128-bit persistent address space hosts a sea of objects and a relational DB cleanly mapped on top of them. Unfortunately, it has the mouthfeel of an IBM midrange OS and largely exists to run RPG. -------------------- --- 432 and BiiN --- -------------------- Intel's iAPX 432 was an attempt to build a clean platform for state-of-the-art object/capability software to run on. Unfortunately it was fundamentally misdesigned, physically large, lacked mature software, and was largely a flop out of the gate. Thankfully, in a rare inverse example of the second-system effect, it was followed up by the 960MX - a conservative cap extension on Intel's well-regarded i960 RISC. The system intended to run on the 960MX, BiiN and its OSIRIS OS, was everything an advanced system should be - user-friendly, approachable, and with a rich set of elegant object-oriented APIs. It was also cancelled immediately before release, while largely complete, due to a desire by Intel to cut their losses and return to prioritizing their safely-profitable PC business. ----------- --- VOS --- ----------- Stratus's Multics-like fault-tolerant OS isn't an advanced work of object-oriented art, but is something nice on its own: a better general-purpose, "normal", server OS than UNIX. Its standard library is an absolute pleasure to develop with, and the OS is friendly and well-thought-out from top to bottom. I miss working with it every time I have to write C on UNIX. ___________________________________________________________________ Gophered by Gophernicus/3.1.1 on Welcome/6.1 ppc64le