In those dark ages, lesser-known systems like QNX Neutrino and BeOS seemed impossibly fast and modern, and possibly represented the future of computing:

A necessary challenge that QNX had to meet was the performance needs of a customer base primarily concerned with realtime applications. Although an elegant OS architecture is a joy to work with, “academic elegance” will not necessarily create a commercially successful operating system—it must also provide performance better than traditional monolithic kernel operating systems. […] For QNX to deliver the full performance of the hardware to the application level (and to exceed the performance of monolithic kernel operating systems), a number of architectural innovations were developed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDzxdv_MPJs