If you had unlimited RAM, CPU time, and HDD space

[earlz]

If you had unlimited ram, cpu time, and hdd space, how would you make your OS?
(also you don't have to worry about being portable)
if there was nothing to worry about in an OS design but user friendlyness, and the handling of unlimited resources, and the expandability of devices and applications?

[Solar]

If you had unlimited ram, cpu time, and hdd space, how would you make your OS?

Fast.

if there was nothing to worry about in an OS design but user friendlyness, and the handling of unlimited resources, and the expandability of devices and applications?

How do you mean? Personally, I think excellent user-friendliness can be done in a dozen Megabytes or so already, so what do you have in mind?

[earlz]

well, I was just eliminating those variables...

Plus, some new UI idea might take gigs and be lightning fast on todays computers, but no one knows because well, we don't have a time machine to see what that idea will be..lol

[mathematician]

Find out what PARC are up to nowadays. That will be tomorrow.

[neon]

Make the first true virtual 3d OS
Assuming I would have infinity time to do it

[Candy]

If you had unlimited ram, cpu time, and hdd space, how would you make your OS?
(also you don't have to worry about being portable)

Readable, maintainable and user-friendly.

[thoover]

i wouldn't know when to stop, lol

1: all drivers pre installed, so no more time delay in driver install
2: 3-D environment
3: 10 monitors at once so you feel like ur in the middle of your fav games
4: voice commands for everything (by itself probably 15gb+)

wow i cant stop, but i have to get back to work on my OS, bb on forms soon!

[B.E]

If you had unlimited ram, cpu time, and hdd space, how would you make your OS?
(also you don't have to worry about being portable)
if there was nothing to worry about in an OS design but user friendlyness, and the handling of unlimited resources, and the expandability of devices and applications?

I would still make my OS as fast as possible (without being memory hungry) and give the rest to the userspace processes (hardware limits would restict the amount of memory I would be able to access).

[AndrewAPrice]

I would use a flat memory model and have all userland programs run in an interpreted scripting language.

[Solidus117]

I would use a flat memory model and have all userland programs run in an interpreted scripting language.

That's what I'm doing for my OS. Except replace scripting language with bytecode.

[os64dev]

If you had unlimited ram, cpu time, and hdd space, how would you make your OS?
(also you don't have to worry about being portable)
if there was nothing to worry about in an OS design but user friendlyness, and the handling of unlimited resources, and the expandability of devices and applications?

Problably get another job because software development will be very lame then. Garbage collection, virtual memory are not needed anymore.

[pcmattman]

Well, my OS would be pretty much the same as it is now .

I don't yet have a really good malloc so I just have a running variable which points to the top of the heap

The HDD space would be the real advantage, IMHO. Terabytes of visual goodness!

[AndrewAPrice]

Well, my OS would be pretty much the same as it is now .

I don't yet have a really good malloc so I just have a running variable which points to the top of the heap

The HDD space would be the real advantage, IMHO. Terabytes of visual goodness!

My OS wouldn't be much different. Speed and memory haven't become a problem yet.

Even with unlimited CPU power, you wouldn't want to write crappy code. A simple logic error causing the code to never complete will result in your computer blowing up (the paradox: if you have unlimited instructions per section, how many times will the loop run through before the timer interrupts it?).

[Alboin]

I would try to create an absolute abstraction from the machine. No files. No devices. Nothing. Everything would become a uniform structure which could be used interchangeably.

This design stems from my use of the JACK audio system in the past. It consists of small programs that work through a general interface. It just works brilliantly. I was amazed at how powerful some small programs could be. For example, say you wanted a pipe organ synthesizer. You would have:

Code: Select all

Rosegarden - To play the MIDI.
              |
              V
Aeolus - Synthesizes the MIDI to a pipe organ.
              |
              V
jack record (Forgot the actual name.) - Records the output of aeolus. 

Now, anywhere in there you could have any number of programs giving details about the stream, or manipulating it in a similar fashion.

I just wonder how this type of system would scale. That is, from simply an application interface, to an interface surrounding an entire system...

PS: This same principle is also found in the shell through pipes, and such.