This may seem silly, but I'd love to see an extremely simple, single user, single tasked OS like CP/M, but written to exploit modern hardware.
The incredibly tall software stack we all live on makes our hardware seem much slower than it actually is, I've long wondered what we could actually get out of modern hardware if we treated it like we used to treat hardware back in the 80s and early 90s - close to the metal and highly optimized.
> The incredibly tall software stack we all live on makes our hardware seem much slower than it actually is
Actually, it doesn't really. Modern OSes take up far more RAM (because more services are kept available) but when you're performing operation solely in user space on a modern system, the OS doesn't really interfere. The only impact on any multitasked system -- process scheduling -- is carefully written to have an undetectably small overhead when there's only one busy process.
The reason why computers can still occasionally feel slow is:
1) They are processing millions (sometimes billions) of times more data than 1980's era computer.
2) You can always fill up the resources on your computer or overwork your hard disk. This can slow your computer down a 1000 fold.
Sorry I should have been more clear. I'm thinking about modern webapps written in Javascript, living in browser, on top of a modern OS pushing all that around (while managing security and virus scanning everything crossing through I/O) with dozens of services running, listening and/or polling various bits of hardware controlled by a scheduler -- once had a printer driver that ate 100MB of RAM and 5% of CPU time background checking to make sure I had paper and enough ink. Sure the convenience of all that is wonderful, but I can't help wonder if things should be much faster than they are.
It really does seem insane to me that I can, at times, type faster than my computer can keep up.
The incredibly tall software stack we all live on makes our hardware seem much slower than it actually is, I've long wondered what we could actually get out of modern hardware if we treated it like we used to treat hardware back in the 80s and early 90s - close to the metal and highly optimized.