1. The Genera operating system for Symbolics Lisp machines. Ever since I've gotten bitten by the Smalltalk and Lisp machine bugs, I've been wanting to use Genera, but I was born at the beginning of the last AI winter, and unfortunately the operating system is still proprietary, with no word about whether or not it will become open sourced. It's regrettable that the proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater when Lisp machines lost out in the marketplace to RISC workstations and the x86 running Lisp on other OSes; there are a lot of interesting lessons we can learn from Genera in today's operating systems and programming environments, and an entire generation of computer scientists and software engineers are unfortunately completely unfamiliar with Lisp machines.
2. I've heard wonderful things about the productivity software developed by Lighthouse Design for NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. I haven't used them myself, but I've read that many NeXTSTEP users were devoted fans of Lighthouse Design software, and the presentation tool that the company designed influenced the design of Apple's Keynote.app. Unfortunately when Sun acquired Lighthouse Design, Sun hasn't done much with the Lighthouse Design codebase. It would have been nice had these programs been updated and further refined for Mac OS X.
3. I would love for someone to resurrect the ideas of Apple's OpenDoc platform, which allows for component-based development of GUI applications, much like how pipes and redirection in Unix allows for different command-line utilities to be used together.
My dream is an operating system where all objects can be inspected (like Smalltalk or a Lisp machine OS), where there is a component framework similar to OpenDoc that allows for component-based GUI application development, and where there's a REPL that allows power users to have complete control over their applications (both command-line and GUI). All applications would adhere to some type of well-designed usability guideline (I'm thinking about the classic Apple Human Interface Guidelines from the pre-OS X days), and the interface would be reminiscent of Mac OS 8.
WRT OpenDoc stuff, you are actually describing COM and ActiveX. COM basically defines an ABI and memory layout for different languages to use to access objects and ActiveX (aka OCX/OLE control) uses it to provide reusable components (mostly visual) that are self-describing so you can access their properties and call their methods without having prior knowledge to them. It was mainly used with classic Visual Basic, but also other environments supported it, like Delphi and today Lazarus also has support for it.
Its use on the open Internet was a nobrainer from an implementation perspective, although it killed the reputation of the entire thing (make a Google search for ActiveX and 99% of the content you'll find is about its use on Internet Explorer) and .NET cemented its demise.
But yeah, the idea is solid and actually other platforms had similar tech, like BeOS's replicants, AmigaOS's... something (i don't remember the name :-P) and i think KDE's KParts was originally supposed to be something like ActiveX.
Wait, what do you mean? The current owner of Symbolics authorized the development of a new I-Machine emulator? Who is working on it, Kalman Reti and Brad Parker? This is very interesting news, please elaborate.
Number three sounds really cool. Command line interfaces is what I eat and breathe all day because there's no replacement for it, and I've often thought how that is stuck in time. I'm not sure what the proper solution would be, otherwise I'd have made it, but it sounds like this might be worth a shot.
OpenDoc is unnecessary on Lisp machines, in Genera you can already build applications by combining any CLOS classes that exist in the system. There is no rigid "application" black box that needs to be broken down into OpenDoc components, everything is an object that calls methods of other objects.
1. The Genera operating system for Symbolics Lisp machines. Ever since I've gotten bitten by the Smalltalk and Lisp machine bugs, I've been wanting to use Genera, but I was born at the beginning of the last AI winter, and unfortunately the operating system is still proprietary, with no word about whether or not it will become open sourced. It's regrettable that the proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater when Lisp machines lost out in the marketplace to RISC workstations and the x86 running Lisp on other OSes; there are a lot of interesting lessons we can learn from Genera in today's operating systems and programming environments, and an entire generation of computer scientists and software engineers are unfortunately completely unfamiliar with Lisp machines.
2. I've heard wonderful things about the productivity software developed by Lighthouse Design for NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. I haven't used them myself, but I've read that many NeXTSTEP users were devoted fans of Lighthouse Design software, and the presentation tool that the company designed influenced the design of Apple's Keynote.app. Unfortunately when Sun acquired Lighthouse Design, Sun hasn't done much with the Lighthouse Design codebase. It would have been nice had these programs been updated and further refined for Mac OS X.
3. I would love for someone to resurrect the ideas of Apple's OpenDoc platform, which allows for component-based development of GUI applications, much like how pipes and redirection in Unix allows for different command-line utilities to be used together.
My dream is an operating system where all objects can be inspected (like Smalltalk or a Lisp machine OS), where there is a component framework similar to OpenDoc that allows for component-based GUI application development, and where there's a REPL that allows power users to have complete control over their applications (both command-line and GUI). All applications would adhere to some type of well-designed usability guideline (I'm thinking about the classic Apple Human Interface Guidelines from the pre-OS X days), and the interface would be reminiscent of Mac OS 8.