Web OSes: There Are Really Or Just a Fully-Featured Web Site

[Nathan]

AJAX is a wonderful technology too.

[Thomas]

Hi,

but I do greatly prefer the old Tandem stuff to the other esoteric environment I work with every day: OpenVMS.

.I heard great things about OpenVMS from many of its customers.I will be a maintainer of this operating system after a few weeks .Can you via PM express the pain points ? VMS is the father of windows operating system , VMS = WNT -1 .


--Thomas

[Benk]

Hi,

but I do greatly prefer the old Tandem stuff to the other esoteric environment I work with every day: OpenVMS.

.I heard great things about OpenVMS from many of its customers.I will be a maintainer of this operating system after a few weeks .Can you via PM express the pain points ? VMS is the father of windows operating system , VMS -1 = WNT .


--Thomas

WNT was closer to Mach3 but borrowed a few things from VMS since thats where David Cutler came from.

[Thomas]

Hi,
[offtopic]
True VMS != WNT,there are some similarities however.You can find out more by reading the book Windows Internals by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon.Windows is not a micro kernel in the strictest sense like Mach{ There is a section explaining that in the book }.Major Similarities between VMS and Windows include
-> Design of the IO Manager and Memory Manager
-> The Scheduling
[/offtopic]

--Thomas

[Nathan]

Just to illustrate, this is the OpenVMS:


It's a wonderful OS, also I have it on a VM on my computer. But I still prefer my old, but good Windows 3.11, that I emulate on DOSBox.

[fronty]

Ah, CDE, got to love it.

[Nathan]

Yeah?

[rknox]

We are going full circle here.

Before some of you were born, there were time sharing systems.

Originally you had an intelligent typewriter - eg a teletype machine or an IBM 2741 (as I recall that was the number). It had an rs323 port, you got a modem, connected it to the port and to your telephone, dialed the phone number of the timeshare company (it had a rotary that served the modems at the timeshare location), got a port, and did your thing. All the intelligence and data were "on the cloud".

I owned such a timeshare company and helped form another.

Then there were minicomputers with multiple rs232 ports - cabled to more sophisticated terminals - such as the vt50 - vt52 - vt100. Users had no local data and no local computer intelligence.

Then they started to put 8088 chips into the terminals on the ends of the cables and called them personal computers. Users wanted to do their word processing even when the main minicomputer was down for backup.

Now the local computers are more powerful than the ones used as mainframes a few years ago - disks are so small you can pick them up.

the cloud is merely a trip back to yesterday.

[gerryg400]

rknox, it sounds like you may be nearly as old as me.

[Brynet-Inc]

The "cloud" is nothing like "yesterday", go install a Unix-like system on your modern every day beige box x86 and congratulations.. you have a multiuser system and can offer accounts to all your buddies, and you can even still interface those ancient terminals to a serial port.

The cloud is not a re-imagining of timesharing systems, it's a bastardization.

[Peterbjornx]

Even ChromiumOS isn't a real OS on its own, from what i have noticed when testing it, it's just a linux distro with GNOME GUI but no WM, and a modified version of chrome ontop of it

[JackScott]

Even ChromiumOS isn't a real OS, from what i have noticed when testing it, it's just a linux distro with GNOME GUI but no WM, and a modified version of chrome ontop of it

Wait, it's a Linux distro capable of running Gnome and a web browser, but it isn't an operating system?

[Peterbjornx]

I mean that its just linux, not a OS completely written from scratch by google

[inx]

I mean that its just linux, not a OS completely written from scratch by google

The same could be said of Android, as it's just Linux with a couple kernel patches, a different libc, a different init system, and a custom VM somewhat integrated with the system.

However, an operating system is more than just a kernel, and considering a couple instances of 'patch', two instances of 'different', and one instance of 'custom', combined with the fact that I didn't even cover all the components involved, I would call it a different OS than what we think of when someone mentions simply 'Linux'.

[ashken]

an OS running on a web browser is a really good idea but where will the browser run? on bare hardware? from the BIOS?