On a tangent, it's perhaps symptomatic of how unfocused Apple was for much of the 90s that they already had "the OS of the future" in the form of A/UX 3. Which

On a tangent, it's perhaps symptomatic of how unfocused Apple was for much of the 90s that they already had "the OS of the future" in the form of A/UX 3. Which was a full SysV Unix implementation with a Mac OS compatibility layer. You got a *ix implementation of the Finder as your GUI, which could also run native System 7 binaries as well as Unix applications. Of course, it was killed for OS 8 (if you worked for Apple or a reseller at the time you'll know how hopelessly over-optimistic that was - if you didn't, it was supposed to be a brand new microkernel, running a multi-user OS written from the ground up as a Mac OS workalike, plus a server for running System 7 apps. There was even talk of being able to run a Windows environment. Needless to say, the MacOS 8 that actually shipped was not that plan) and Taligent/Pink. Then they bought NeXT and got... a BSD Unix running the NeXTStep userland and an MacOS Classic compatibility later.