OSDev.org

I vaguely recall an operating system which had global undo and (probably) a versioning file system. I think it was written in Lisp, and I think it was the one which had a bright yellow website in the '00s. I was never quite interested enough to download it until now, but now I have no idea what the name is. Anyone have any ideas?

(Not sure which forum to post this in.)

I think you're referring to TUNES, which I had looked into around then. AFAIK, it never got very far.

Schol-R-LEA wrote:I think you're referring to TUNES, which I had looked into around then. AFAIK, it never got very far.

That was a blast from the past! Crazy... I'm pretty sure it's that one OS site I couldn't take seriously. The OS I'm thinking of came up in the same searches, back when Google was a bit more primitive. I was searching for operating systems, but there were very few interesting results; one which had me curious and one which looked insane, (and maybe a handful of others which have ended up in a different pigeon-hole in my brain.) I don't think I got them mixed up, but I might have. The one I'm thinking of seemed to be a one-developer project, a professor, I think. Maybe it didn't have a download anyway.

What do you even mean by a "global undo"?

Up until the part about having had a website in the 2000s, the description sounds like a Lisp Machine OS from the 70s/80s, other than the part about LISP, it could describe a fair number of decades-old OSes.

Love4Boobies wrote:What do you even mean by a "global undo"?

Any action can be undone.

linguofreak wrote:Up until the part about having had a website in the 2000s, the description sounds like a Lisp Machine OS from the 70s/80s, other than the part about LISP, it could describe a fair number of decades-old OSes.

I didn't know there were many like that. It rather sounds like operating systems have retrgrogressed, but I can sort-of understand why. Maybe I should look up that OS which provides a Lisp Machine environment on PCs. Maybe that's what the project became.

Now where has that gone? It seemed quite mature when I last saw the site, had a shiny window system and everything. Aha! Mezzano must be it. And search specifically by name to find its website. Absolutely no hint of global undo or versioning filesystem in the surface info, will look more tomorrow.

Searching turned up a weird range of stuff. The MakerLisp machine looks like it might be fun, but I don't know if I could get it on my planet. Definition of liss: "an ancient Irish fortification or storage place... New Latin, from Greek lissos, lispos, lisphos..." Not exactly a walled garden, but kind-of close. High search rank for a paper and site which attacks every part of common OS architecture! I might pick through it, but I'm put off by the crazy bit about the concept of processes being obsolete, suggesting libraries instead. It's like he wants the entire system to be dll hell. I'm being careful not to fall into that trap with my system. Edit: Nah, that paper is a self-indulgent whine-fest full of shallow nonsense.

Hacker News reminded me I don't necessarily want a filesystem, but I wonder how versioning would work for data stored in an image? I suppose you'd have to have a collating period, but that's hardly ideal in itself.

pitfall wrote:A bright yellow website ?
A versioning FS ?

It might be O3ONE : http://o3one.org

But I don't recall if global undo exists in this OS...

Thanks! It does look familiar. I think I must have got multiple projects mixed up, probably O3ONE and TUNES, but Timewarp might have been in there too. I heard a bit about Timewarp lately; don't remember details, but there was definitely something about rolling back any action.

Wow! O3ONE's site is an Internet antique, I love it!

Hi,

eekee wrote:I vaguely recall an operating system which had global undo and (probably) a versioning file system.

That was VMS (now called OpenVMS). It has a versioning file system (called FILES-11), and it also has a system call to create a snapshot of a process' memory to which the administrator can revert to at any time. It supports transactions and suspend/resume operations too.

Cheers,
bzt