cheesestraws
Well-known member
It'd have to be a rewrite of the core of the OS, essentially. You can't generally get away with just strapping protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking on on the side.
It's not so much the knowledge that's the problem, it's the sheer amount of work it'd be. Someone would have to dedicate a lot of time to it, so you'd have to find someone who really, really wanted it.
In the past I've sketched out designs for things like "seamlessly running lots of instances of rootless Basilisk with an ExtFS driver to provide a seamless view of the underlying FS under some BSD" to get part of the way there and even that's more work than I'm prepared to put in to produce something that's frankly neither one thing nor t'other.
Copland wasn't salvageable at the time and isn't salvageable now. The problem with it is fundamentally a kind of maximalism which set in at Apple at the time, and which meant that the whole system attained a mind-bending level of complication where everything used everything else. Nobody seemed to be able to say 'no' to anything.
When a piece of software is flawed at that deep a level, in its design and architecture, I'm afraid the only sane thing to do with it is to walk away, and preferably set fire to it before doing so.
It would be eminently theoretically possible, though a lot of work, for someone to come up with a "next generation" successor to classic MacOS. I've done some sketches of things like "a better Resource Manager" myself. But practically, it isn't likely to happen, simply because it would be windmill-tilting at its most gloriously excessive. Look at ReactOS and Haiku; look at how long it took them to get usable, and they were starting from the designs of OSes that were far more modern than classic MacOS.
