Comment Microware OS-9 (Score 2) 221
Also interesting to ponder is what would the Amiga be like if the Microware company (famous in some niche circles for the 6809 OS-9 version for the Tandy Color Computer) had come to licensing terms with Amiga during development and similarly released the 68000 version of OS-9 for the Amiga. OS-9 for those not in the know is a now defunct multi-user multi-tasking operating system built on lego-block style modules. Not a monolithic kernel like Linux, and not a message passing microkernel like QNX, the OS-9 operating system allowed the user to cobbler (the name of the tool used) together a new combination of modules to recreate the boot image file and restart on it. Modules could even be loaded or replaced on the fly (within certain limitations), and included different types for functional layers including descriptor (device name pointing to other modules used), block driver, filesystem code, etc. Even the memory management module containing the allocation algorithm could be replaced, which was a powerful feature to reduce fragmentation and allocation speed based on the needs of the system.