[nickpsecurity]

System/38, later AS/400, was one of the most brilliantly designed systems of the time that I've seen:

https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/Chapter8.pdf

Designed for business apps, future-proofing, integrated database, largely self-managing, capability-security, continuing on solid (POWER) hardware... did about everything right. That's why we regularly fix crashed Windows and 'NIX machines but my company's AS/400 has been running for around 10 years.

I've always wanted a modern, clean-slated version of the System/38 w/out relics from that time and with any tricks we've learned since. Throw in hardware acceleration for garbage collection and some NonStop-style tricks for fault-tolerance to have a beast of a machine.

[protomyth]

Strangely, I've always wanted a modern version of the Burroughs Large Systems, but I like stack machines and have been a fan of Forth and Postscript.

[nickpsecurity]

It's not strange for anyone whose read this:

http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr...

A similarly amazing machine that IBM's System/38 learned from a little bit. Somebody posted a link to an emulator but honestly I don't want to dredge through that. Like you said, a modern system that reimplemented its best attributes without the limitations or baggage would be nice.

Mainframes are complex enough that there's rarely projects to implement them but there's lots of work on safer CPU's. See crash-safe.org's early publications for a CPU that combined Burrough's-style checks, Alpha ISA, and functional programming at system level. Given stack preference, you might like these:

http://www.jopdesign.com/

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~jared/ssp-hase-submission.pdf

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/pete/acl206/papers/hardin.pdf