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Ask Slashdot: If You Could Assemble a "FrankenOS" What Parts Would You Use?
rnws writes: While commenting about log-structured file systems in relation to flash SSDs, I referenced Digital's Spiralog [pdf], released for OpenVMS in 1996. This got me thinking about how VMS to this day has some of, if not the best storage clustering (still) in use today. Many operating systems have come and gone over the years, particularly from the minicomputer era, and each usually had something unique it did really well. If you could stitch together your ideal OS, then which "body parts" would you use from today and reanimate from the past? I'd probably start with VMS's storage system, MPE's print handling, OS/2's Workplace Shell, AS/400's hardware abstraction and GNU's Bash shell. What would you choose?
Maybe some people do not appreciate it, but I think that having SOM (System Object Model) and WorkplaceShell (built over SOM) gave some functionality that was never exploited properly. So, building a Frankenstein I will put over the GUI, SOM (maybe the open NOM and somFree) and the Desktop elements will be built over it. (like Workplace Shell). Check out this OS/2 reference graphic: http://www.edm2.com/index.php/...
BeOS has an incredibly responsive UI. I am not a software engineer so I am not sure which part of the OS is in charge of this, but it's something no other OS has been able to do, before and since: be perfectly responsive to user commands (keyboard and mouseclicks). What this means is: no matter what the computer is doing at any given time, the UI will react to the user commands. There is no file-copy too big, a computational task too complex, that the reaction to a user's command would be delayed. BeOS has spoiled me so much, because with that OS, user comes first, always.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
There was a desktop OS called Domain/OS from Apollo Systems. Rumour had it that Apollo was founded by Multicians who fled from Honneywell. It was a great OS on a lot of levels, not least you had native Domain/OS, BSD4.3 and System5 UNIX, an amazing shared filesystem, and networking that was literally plug and play.
Then of course HP bought it and killed it in favor of HP/UX, sigh.
Who, me?
No thanks. As it is, today's systems suffer from too much dependency on non-native bloatware.
Oh for fuck sake stop pretending like everything today sucks and the "back in my day" systems were so much better. Those systems were slow, buggy, unstable junk that was cobbled together using various different vendor-specific implementations. Remember 3D graphics of the 90s? It was junk, we needed unified abstractions to avoid the instability of those old architectures.
Yes if everybody promised to play nice you wouldnt need to worry about the overhead of sandboxing applications or about malware and various other security tactics but this overhead exists as personal computing has become more ubiquitous. And if nobody cared about information presentation you could have the static web of the 90s too. But there's a subset of old people like yourself that can't adapt to new technology so just criticize it in order to try to stay relevant.