Jobs is what makes or breaks Apple in that critical period. I didn't like him but that's relevant to the success of the company. JLG did not have whatever it was Jobs gave the company.

We paid Cygnus(?) millions for that. The multiple virtual inheritance needed for MediaKit was a real joy to get working.

In the places where there's something entirely different going on, such as networking in earlier BeOS, it's trash and you'd obviously want to throw it away and do what Unix did - Be were doing so. So a hypothetical turn of the century fruit-flavour BeOS is probably much closer to "Unix with a different UI" than you're thinking. NeXT changed nothing there.

GNOME 3 was trying to built a clean modern minimalist desktop without all the clutter inherited from the design of Windows... But all they know is, very visibly, Windows and KDE.

RISC OS is that clean legacy free desktop. It's unlike anything else, built from scratch by a team not interested in what the rest of the world was doing.

And it's still alive and still updated and works well on modern hardware. Several separate efforts are building 64-bit replacements today.

The other thing is that it says right at the start of the BeOS Book - and this is carried across to Haiku - is that you shouldn't have a spinner or hourglass. It should do *something*, it shouldn't make you wait.

At this point, they could likely decompile MacOS classic and rework it to give it modern memory protection, virtual memory, preemptive multitasking, and networking.

I assume booting an OS with a mere few megabytes of RAM footprint would only take milliseconds?

Good work everyone who made this for Haiku.

I remember using the fluxbox wm like this back on the university Sun machines

I loved the tabs on BeOS.

https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap

https://github.com/stefansundin/altdrag

Speaking of which. It is not a Linux solution but stock X11 twm window manager features dating back into 1988, i.e.:

  NoTitle

  BorderWidth 0

  Button1 = m4 : window : f.move

  Button3 = m4 : window : f.resize

[0] m4 stands for the Mod4 modifier, now commonly assigned to the Super/Windows key. The equivalent 1988 configuration would have used m (Meta), since the original binding syntax supported Shift, Control and Meta only.

The original Nike store in NYC purchased one to do their signage media playback. It didn’t go well.

I seem to recall that you could hold down Alt key and drag the tab horizontally. So a tab could stick up anywhere along the top of the window frame. The SPARCStations had three-button mice, and this might have been mapped to middle or right mouse button.

The tabbed interface features the ability to gather windows into tab groups. So when you are moving a window by dragging its tab, if you drag the tab next to another window's tab, the dragged window will snap to that other window's frame, the dragged window will be the selected tab and its contents displayed in the frame. Then dragging any of the tabs drags the whole set of tabs that are snapped to that frame. Click on a tab to make it the active tab displayed in the frame.

It's effectively like tabs now, but sort of inside out: tabs are managed by the windows manager and not the app. Tab groups of multiple, different apps. The app does not have to be "tab-aware" to be in a tab group, although I suppose there are events that can signal the manager to make a window the selected tab. It's just raising a window, making it frontmost. Modal dialogs can get tangled up, but it's no worse than the mess commonly accepted today.