Microsoft's Vision For Future Operating Systems

Bender writes: "The Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research has a fascinating article that details what sorts of things they believe may be important in Operating Systems of the 21st century."

Comments

Old Article (i.e. 1997) and More Recent Work

[ben_houston]

This is quite an old article. It originally appeared in the "Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS-VI)".
RE: http://www.computer.org/proceedings/hotos/7834/783 40106abs.htm

If you would like to find out more articles related to this one check out this page at ResearchIndex:
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/21325.html

Cheers,
-ben

Old article

[Wesley Felter]

That article is so old the project is over already. Still interesting to think about, though.

Re:Old article

[darkonc]

No. C# was designed to replace Java. Java was designed to meet some of those goals. C# just inhereted some of these capabilities from it's prequel.

As to why it's not mentioned, this article pre-dates the need for C#. Sun's suit against Microsoft wasn't that advanced in early-mid '97.

Re:BSOD

[Wyatt Earp]

I've seen it Blue-Screen.

I've seen it blue-screen straight out of the box from Dell and Gateway.

I've seen Windows 2000 not only blue-screen, but I've seen them reboot themselves when Windows Media Player or Quicktime start to play video clips.

I've seen Windows 2000 blue-screen when a USB keyboard is plugged into them.

It's better than NT or 9x, but it still sucks.

Re:ack

[Salamander]

I'm glad I wasnt the only one thinking Freenet all the way through reading that article....strange it didnt get a credit - it already does pretty much all the data side of what they were talking about

Oh, bullshit. The paper specifically talks about data remaining in the system until it's no longer needed or referenced; Freenet drops data whenever it feels like it. The paper talks about making storage hierarchies invisible; Freenet as currently implemented is totally non-transparent, requiring a user to explicitly download a file in the Freenet app and then operate on it in another app. Freenet's primary goal is to obscure the identities of requesters and responders - information that will most definitely be necessary to keep a general-purpose distributed OS secure.

There's nothing wrong with the fact that Freenet is this way. Those are its design goals, and they're valid ones. It's just not at all related to what the Millennium folks lay out. Continuing to push Freenet as the solution to every problem when it's really only a solution for an extremely narrow range of problems just makes Freenet advocates look like fools.