TUNES means a Useful, Not Expedient, System. TUNES is not an operating system that sucks, because TUNES is not an operating system. It does a better job than an operating system because the language is the OS, and conversely, the OS is the language. For a Thing to be TUNES, both of those things have to be continuously flexible and malleable, and they have to handle themselves for you; that's called reflection. That's where research is important to making TUNES Things. This is kind of like turtles all the way down in some respects. The Symbolics Lisp Machine had an OS called Genera built from Lisp which is something like it. Today there is Squeak, which is not as close but much more fun!