[Moving this to luv-talk] Rohan McLeod <rhn@jeack.com.au> wrote:
is it: 1/ possible 2/ likely and if it happened what would be the consequences ?
I would expect it to be possible at the cost of backward compatibility. It is extremely unlikely ever to happen: Microsoft have a modern kernel, the design of which is said to derive from Vax VMS. Apparently some of the VMS people went to Microsoft and developed what became the Windows NT kernel. In any case, given that Microsoft already have one of their own, there is absolutely no reason for them to change. Apple didn't have a kernel capable of preemptive multi-tasking, as I recall, so they developed a derivative of 4.4 BSD and then used technologies from NextStep for the GUI. So as far as I know there's no parallel at all here.