Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?

Microsoft Word 5 Mac edition. Just redevelop it, no additions or changes, except a conforming UI.

That was the last good word processor before it all went to hell.

Turbo Pascal was my first. You never forget your first. Turbo C then Turbo C++ were also amazing. My fingers still remember the copy/paste ^KB ^KC.

Jet Moto. All it needed was a track editor.

I have a few software packages in mind:

1. The Genera operating system for Symbolics Lisp machines. Ever since I've gotten bitten by the Smalltalk and Lisp machine bugs, I've been wanting to use Genera, but I was born at the beginning of the last AI winter, and unfortunately the operating system is still proprietary, with no word about whether or not it will become open sourced. It's regrettable that the proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater when Lisp machines lost out in the marketplace to RISC workstations and the x86 running Lisp on other OSes; there are a lot of interesting lessons we can learn from Genera in today's operating systems and programming environments, and an entire generation of computer scientists and software engineers are unfortunately completely unfamiliar with Lisp machines.

2. I've heard wonderful things about the productivity software developed by Lighthouse Design for NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. I haven't used them myself, but I've read that many NeXTSTEP users were devoted fans of Lighthouse Design software, and the presentation tool that the company designed influenced the design of Apple's Keynote.app. Unfortunately when Sun acquired Lighthouse Design, Sun hasn't done much with the Lighthouse Design codebase. It would have been nice had these programs been updated and further refined for Mac OS X.

3. I would love for someone to resurrect the ideas of Apple's OpenDoc platform, which allows for component-based development of GUI applications, much like how pipes and redirection in Unix allows for different command-line utilities to be used together.

My dream is an operating system where all objects can be inspected (like Smalltalk or a Lisp machine OS), where there is a component framework similar to OpenDoc that allows for component-based GUI application development, and where there's a REPL that allows power users to have complete control over their applications (both command-line and GUI). All applications would adhere to some type of well-designed usability guideline (I'm thinking about the classic Apple Human Interface Guidelines from the pre-OS X days), and the interface would be reminiscent of Mac OS 8.

Solaris was mostly open source; there are plenty of derivatives. Look up "illumos". I use Joyent's SmartOS pretty regularly and it's pretty solid.

EDIT: unless you meant the video game, which someone just told me is a thing… oops.