AROS
I have a confession to make. I never owned an Amiga. Back when Amiga owners had a multi-tasking GUI running on top of a microkernel, I was using Windows 3.0 on MS-DOS. And I’m still bitter.
For those of us who missed out the first time, the AROS Research Operating System (AROS) provides some surrogate nostalgia. For its era, the AROS OS was an impressive piece of work. It ran on very slow hardware (by today's standards), but still managed to provide an impressive user experience. Of course, this came at a cost.
Perhaps the biggest price paid by the AROS OS was the lack of protected memory. This is seen as vital these days; the idea that one rogue application could trample over another’s memory seems remarkably quaint. Swapping, something that usually goes hand-in-hand with virtual memory, is similarly absent.