I would be very curious to see a list of features which were available in defunct OSes that are not available or only available via kludge these days. There are some great ideas still out there in the wild.
- 64-bit, journaled, UTF-8 capable, extended attributes: things that are standard today but novel at the time
- It had "live queries" meaning feeds into file changes. AFAIK only NTFS has that today with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USN_Journal. Inotify is a hack: have you tried monitoring your root folder ?
AmigaOS had (well, has, but it's pretty much defunct) a lot of interesting things such as ARexx, DataTypes, Assigns and a standardized software installer.
Interlisp/Medley has sort of revived as an application that runs on your computer: https://interlisp.org/
There’s also Mezzano which is a relatively new, from scratch Common Lisp implementation on bare metal: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
Finally, if you know where to look, it’s possible to setup a Symbolics VM on Linux, which is somewhat interesting to poke around in (all the manuals available out of the box are pretty interesting to read through.)
My Linux-fu might just be to weak but I haven't yet managed to get the Symbolics VM to run. I was wondering, if there exists a Linux VM were someone already got it to work or if you could do it inside a container?
It just seems really cumbersome and that is a shame, because it seems so worth to take a look at it.
