In the good ol' days of supercomputers (the '70s, for you
youngsters), feature-rich, stable operating systems were hard to
find, probably because they didn't exist. I know this for a
fact, because I was in charge of one of the early operating
systems. We did the best we could, but we were just feeling our
way along. Anyone who has implemented large computer systems
knows that you have to suppress your feelings, else the 100 hour
work weeks become intolerable. That naturally resulted in
suppressed operating systems where designers cared less about
how the user felt. Our goal was to get something that worked and
was useful. Today, there are many capable, more or less stable
systems that provide good feature-rich functionality. They do,
however, need a rich company to upgrade those rich features so
that the system becomes ever richer. It is not uncommon to
update systems at least once a month, if for no other reason
than to add the latest security patch. Supercomputers provide an
easy way out. Their operating sy