It would be interesting to see Taos running somewhere, and also the source code for it. Given that the c2 article about it talks about object orientation, I wonder how that was exposed to high level programming languages. The archives posted to the stardot thread about TAOS are probably worth exploring. The Developers Edition looks like it might work in a suitably old Windows environment.
Inferno is a lot more pragmatic, I'd say, being in many ways an incremental update to Plan 9. In my experience, it's certainly simpler than other operating systems, but not necessarily simple unless you are playing at the same level as the Bell Labs folks. ;-) At least there's a book about it that covers how it works to some extent. I think the system is a good starting point for something else, perhaps, but it needs some updating for the modern world, of course.
Taos and Inferno
It would be interesting to see Taos running somewhere, and also the source code for it. Given that the c2 article about it talks about object orientation, I wonder how that was exposed to high level programming languages. The archives posted to the stardot thread about TAOS are probably worth exploring. The Developers Edition looks like it might work in a suitably old Windows environment.
Inferno is a lot more pragmatic, I'd say, being in many ways an incremental update to Plan 9. In my experience, it's certainly simpler than other operating systems, but not necessarily simple unless you are playing at the same level as the Bell Labs folks. ;-) At least there's a book about it that covers how it works to some extent. I think the system is a good starting point for something else, perhaps, but it needs some updating for the modern world, of course.