Avoiding OS Myopia, or what's the strangest OS you know?

[ker2x]

Amoeba ?

http://www.cs.vu.nl/pub/amoeba/amoeba.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_dis ... ing_system

[elderK]

Not an operating in its own right but the Plessey 250 system was interesting and so are object-capabilty systems in general.

There's a book available online called "Capability based sytems." It's free and it documents a lot of capability-based systems. It's worth a read

As for modern renditions of the object-capability idea there's CapROS, Coyotos and EROS. There's also the "E" language.

Anywho. Going off topic
~K

[Arto]

So in short, what I want to know is what are, in your opinions, the most bizarre, out-there, off-the-wall OS designs? Obviously, sometimes there's a reason things are done a certain way, but seeing WHY this is, and examples of failures to try and do things differently can be incredibly enlightening. Anyway, yeah, right now, the most 'unusual' (for me) design I've been reading about has been capability based OSes, in particular the J. Shapiro family of OSes. [...] Really interested to hear everyone's responses!

Shapiro's EROS was definitely one of those moments for me, back in the day. Capability-based security and orthogonal persistence, way ahead of their time. I've followed Shapiro's work ever since.

In industry, at least so far as non-trivial consumer computing devices are concerned, true orthogonal persistence didn't really arrive until the iPad. But poking about EROS, long before SSDs were available, it was already clear that this was going to be the way of the future and that the "Save" button was destined for the dustbin of history. Slowly, ever so slowly, that's now happening.

Another eureka was reading Massalin's thesis on the Synthesis kernel. The unconventional ideas therein still seem to me to have great untapped future potential, though admittedly self-modifying code is something of a bad idea on contemporary CPUs these days. But that doesn't mean it will remain thus forever.

Yet a third category of special awesome is anything by Chuck Moore, the creator of Forth, colorForth, and, most recently, GreenArrays. Moore has been swimming so far out of the mainstream for so many decades that his creations sometimes seem like imported alien technology. Definitely lends you a different perspective, particularly regarding taking Wirth's law seriously.

[Muazzam]

I think, MSB-OS is strangest OS. That is written in machine code.

[Combuster]

I think, MSB-OS is strangest OS. That is written in machine code.

I can do better than that! Here, have my new OS to keep your processor busy. Just stick it onto a bootsector and you're set. It's also the smallest possible one you'll come across:

Code: Select all

11101011 11111110

[eryjus]

I can do better than that! Here, have my new OS to keep your processor busy. Just stick it onto a bootsector and you're set. It's also the smallest possible one you'll come across:

Code: Select all

11101011 11111110

I like it!! Works perfectly!

[Muazzam]

I think, MSB-OS is strangest OS. That is written in machine code.

I can do better than that! Here, have my new OS to keep your processor busy. Just stick it onto a bootsector and you're set. It's also the smallest possible one you'll come across:

Code: Select all

11101011 11111110

MSB-OS is not strange due to machine language but I was saying that its user interface and design is strange.

[DavidCooper]

MSB-OS is not strange due to machine language but I was saying that its user interface and design is strange.

It's strange more for the way it's being built, starting out with something that's able to develop itself without depending on any outside software (beyond the BIOS). The user interface has yet to be developed beyond a minimal system for allowing programs to be selected and run. Once the new version comes out, it'll look a lot more ordinary and it will have a nice, boring GUI on it.

[iansjack]

TempleOS. Just read the charter: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/Charter.html

[Arto]

TempleOS. Just read the charter: http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/Charter.html

Incidentally, VICE Motherboard just yesterday published an interesting feature article on TempleOS and its creator: God's Lonely Programmer.

TempleOS is more than an exercise in retro computing, or a hobbyist’s space for programming close to the bare metal. It’s the brainchild—perhaps the life’s work—of 44-year-old Terry Davis, the founder and sole employee of Trivial Solutions. For more than a decade Davis has worked on it; today, TempleOS is 121,176 lines of code [...] Davis says, "For ten years, I worked on programming TempleOS, full time. I finished, basically, and the last year has been tiny touch-ups here and there."