Also do you have an opinion on BeOS?
NT solves it properly. Efficient multithreading support and I/O (especially asynchronous I/O) are just so intrinsically related. Trying to bend UNIX processes and IPC and signals and synchronous I/O into an efficient threading implementation is just trying to fit a square peg in a round hole in my opinion.
As for reading list... I've bought so many old books lately. Here's my "makes the short list" bookshelf: http://imgur.com/DfTUVQx
And the more ridiculous one that I use as a cover page on my resume: http://imgur.com/0u9OZcN
What things in particular are you interested in?
Thanks for the answer. I guess what I'm interested is somewhat obscure/historical operating systems and also HW that are in some way superior to currently popular solutions. The more comparative the better.
Also your reading list has quite a few Oracle SQL entries so I'm guessing it's your preferred DB of choice. What features are you using that aren't available in MySQL or Postgres?
You can do some phenomenally sophisticated things... I extensively leveraged things like partitioning, parallel execution (dbms_parallel_execute!), lots of PL/SQL using the pipelined table cursor stuff, data mining stuff (dbms_frequent_itemset!), index-organized tables, and my god, bitmap indexes were a godsend, direct insert tricks for bulk data loading, external tables were fantastic (you can wrap a .csv in an external table and interact with it in parallel just like any other table -- great for ingesting large amounts of janky .csv data from other parts of the business).
The parallel execution and robust partitioning options were probably the most critical pieces that have no particularly good counterpart in open source land.
