[pjmlp]

BeOS doesn't have anything to do with UNIX.

No user isolation on a single-user machine, via type safe languages, was already done in Xerox PARC workstation written in Mesa/Cedar.

Actually had Apple adopted BeOS and succeeded in doing that, there wouldn't be any major UNIX desktop to talk about.

[username223]

It had Bash and partial POSIX compatibility, but you're right -- it wasn't Unix.

BeOS was awesome as an OS built ground-up for affordable GUI-capable personal computers. It was incredibly responsive and capable at a time when the PC alternatives were Mac OS (crashy), Windows 95 (lots of legacy baggage), and X11R5 on Linux (a clone of a knockoff of a mainframe OS).

IIRC the PARC systems cost $20k or more in today's dollars, and were strongly tied to a single programming language. (I've read about them, but haven't used one.)

[derefr]

Presuming everything else went the same way elsewhere in the ecosystem, Unix greybeards might have become very excited about Android or ChromeOS and the "developer hype" might have pushed Google into making one or the other a workstation OS.

(Or we could call W10 a Unix desktop. Is that allowed?)

[pjmlp]

There is a big difference between being a UNIX and just supporting POSIX syscalls, regarding OS architecture.