+1 Copland
BeOS. I like to daydream about an alternate reality where it was acquired by Sony, and used as the foundation for PlayStation, Sony smartphones, and eventually a viable alternative to Windows on their Vaio line.
Neal Stephenson, https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt :
> Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated… (Apple) sold motorized vehicles--expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.
> (Microsoft) is much, much bigger… the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success.
> On the other side of the road… (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market--and yet cheaper than the others.
> … and Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks.
It would be years before OS X could handle things that wouldn’t cause BeOS to break a sweat, and BeOS still has a bit of a responsiveness edge that OS X still can't seem to match (probably due to the PDF rendering layer).