Unfortunately our industry's mainstream systems for the most part have badly done half-hearted implementations of past innovations. What's most disheartening is

Unfortunately our industry's mainstream systems for the most part have badly done half-hearted implementations of past innovations. What's most disheartening is that for example stuff like low-latency audio isn't reliably available on mainstream platforms. There's always some dance you have to go through if you need it. On one platform the dance takes longer than on others, but the fact remains that even this was no problem on BeOS. I'm not saying BeOS was without faults, but it was a general purpose system and excelled in some regards which hasn't been available in the same quality since, unless you're willing to restrict yourself to certain hardware or API restrictions. The saddest part is that the BeOS IP has since been tucked away inside that Japanese company (Access Ltd?) and is lost to the world. I've tried Haiku but it's not the same. Just imagine if BeOS had been open sourced under an acceptable license back when it actually had good hardware support for its time.