Niche Operating Systems

Eugenia writes: "So, you think that BeOS or AtheOS are niche Operating Systems? Well, you haven't seen anything yet. OSNews provides a list and short description of the most active and most promising Operating Systems written by individuals or small teams just for the fun of it or because they have a dream of how the perfect OS should be (is there such a thing though?). Some of them, like SkyOS for example, are even quite far down the line in terms of usability and advancements."

Comments

Another resource

[Z4rd0Z]

FreeOS is another good place to find out about these kind of operating systems.

Interesting OSes

[DGolden]

EROS is a very promising O.S. - orthogonally persistent, cool security.

An "interesting" OS is AROS - it's AmigaOS, but open-source on x86, complete with Amiga-style:

pre-emptive multitasking.

total lack of memory protection, except for "cooperative" m.p. via semaphore locking.

blazingly fast IPC by by-reference message passing

on-the-fly shared library function patching

user-space device drivers (though, without any memory protection, user space is a pretty abstract concept :-).

integrated GUI + unix-like shell.

Also has a fun "soft-pseudo-reboot in a fraction of a second" feature, based on just freeing all memory except the kernel + vectoring to the kernel entry point - whcih means, you may crash due to lack of memory protection, but you'll be back up,very,very quickly :-).

Re:How about OS's that should be brought back?

[ajs]

Apollo's (then HP/Apollo, then HP) Domain/OS (originally Aegis) was the world's first network-based workstation operating system. By this I mean that it was developed to be a seamless part of a network of clients, servers and devices. It was a vaguely UNIX-like OS (which had UNIX emulation packages to layer on top of it) which was tied to the Apollo hardware.

Up until the RISC revolution, Apollo's hardware was not very exciting, but the Prism architecture in their DN10000 line made their OS really shine as an accedemic and scientific computing platform. Also, their DSEE (forunner of and superior to ClearCase) source control and versioning environment made it a powerfully compelling environment for large teams of programmers who needed to work collaberatively.

A great platform, gone forever because their marketting sucked and HP had no vision. :-(

Freedows

[alumshubby]

Maybe this is unhealthy nostalgia on my part, but remember the Freedows operating system? Apart from at least one personality involved, it sounded like an interesting idea. I wonder if it's still percolating in somebody's basement or if it'll ever get dusted off and looked at afresh. The Alliance OS project was going to use the same cache-kernel technology, but it apparently hasn't budged either.