my cunning plan seems to be working...
Anyway, now that this topic's been completely derailed... assuming you had the time, inclination and skill to write an operating system for 68k machines, what would be the key features that set it apart from what's currently available?
When I was a child, my third computer after a Sinclair ZX80, then Timex/Sinclair 1000 was a Sinclair QL. It came with 128k of memory, 512x256 four color graphics, preemptive multitasking, and an m68008. I was in love. This was in 1985 or so. Programming on the Z80 is cumbersome because of the fact that you're always painfully aware that you're on an 8 bit processor with some 16 bit abilities. I tried doing some 8086 assembly, but in reality it was no different than a Z80 with bank switching built-in. It was a kludge.
The m68k, though, was gorgeous. Eight 32 bit general purpose registers and seven 32 bit address registers (the eighth is the stack pointer) were a dream come true.
These days, kids are spoiled. They have tons of development tools for any kind of hardware they might find in the trash for free. You want a good c compiler? Download it. You don't have Internet? Go to the public library and get it. In 1985, though, compilers cost lots and lots of money. The only good c compiler for the Sinclair at that time was Small-C, which ironically was 16 bit (!) and cost a lot of money for a thirteen-year-old.
I ended up extending SuperBASIC on the Sinclair (it was actually not bad - it was typeless and procedural, and you could easily write code which looked very similar to the same code written in c or Pascal). I wrote programs with large parts in assembly language which took color screenshots and printed them on an ImageWriter II, extended that so I could print large color bitmaps with more colors (especially useful when I had a Trump card which extended memory to 896k), I wrote my own VT52 / VT100 terminal program with screen capture, redraw, printouts, and so on.
The nice thing about the Sinclair is that you could jump into assembly so easily from SuperBasic that it was completely easy to test, debug, and get things working in a short amount of time. Doing assembly, or even programming at all on a Mac requires (usually expensive) software and a bunch of setup to even get started.
If I were to write an OS from scratch, I suppose I'd like to use the model of the QL - a command line, a system with which to program easily, and an extensible procedural language so that one could start with primitives and build complexity in little pieces. It's very similar to the Unix philosophy, too.
