[benschilke]

Simson Garfinkel writes in an article (http://www.techreview.com/magazine/oct01/garfinkel.asp) that the original Mac OS could have had preemptive multi-tasking and protected memory if Apple had waited to use the 68010 chip for the original Macintosh. Would we have needed a completely new OS if the old system had had these more stabilizing features? Or have they been a very good reason to convert to a more stable (?)--Unix--foundation?

When was the 68010 available?

[lenz]

that's interesting...If anyone knows more about this, I'd like to know. As for the move to UNIX, if we had pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory since 84 and apple continually improved upon it there would have been no reason to go to UNIX. Essentially, the MacOS would have been the same thing as NeXT which is advanced enough.

[cpt kangarooski]

It would've nevertheless almost certainly required a new OS anyway. The entire Copland project was to graft those sorts of features onto MacOS, but retain compatability with binaries, etc.

It didn't work.

Compatability layers, such as Classic are the way to go, but there's no advantage that OS X has, aside from having had Apple work on it, that it brought to the table above anything else. BeOS had a good Mac emulator, there are still a few others floating about, and you could've even ported it to NT/PPC if you wanted.

Unix was not, IMO, a wise choice. I rather doubt if any OS would've been.

The Motorola 68010 came out around 1982, IIRC. The market back then was not as fond of brand-new chips in consumer hardware as it is now.