Brian Lanning wrote:
What would really be neat is take some middle to
high-end modern
hardware with high end graphics and sound hardware, and write a new
minimalist OS similar to the AmigaOS from scratch in machine language
with as little extra crap as possible.
That would be neat. I remember a friend and I made a reasonably serious
attempt at writing a "modern" OS when I was at uni in the early 90s, taking
some of the best concepts from Unix and what was then a fledgling Windows NT,
and adding our own twists to it. I seem to recall we got most of the kernel
done, along with rudimentary filesystem, disk and video drivers, but in the
end drinking beer was just far too important.
I'm not sure that I've got any of the code left, although I think I might
still have armfuls of design notes somewhere in storage overseas. It was an
interesting experience for sure. With a few more people it might have actually
got somewhere, I suppose.
Anyway, some form of collaborative minimalist OS project might be fun, at
least the design side; it's years since I've done any PC assembler and I'm not
sure I'd want to get back into it again. How about a minimalist OS running in
an emulator of a m68k-based computer?
It would be practically impossible for a start-up
or a resurrected commodore to create a computer that's really 10 years
ahead of everything else.
I'm quite a believer in distributing code, and in running code on as diverse
range of devices as possible. If it can be assumed that everything has a
network connection at all times (which perhaps won't be that unreasonable in a
decade or so) it's possible to throw a lot of functionality onto "other
machines out there" and make the system that the user actually interacts with
quite streamlined.
*if* that's the way things go, then technically someone could design and build
a computer that was ten years ahead of its time - it's just that nobody
would buy it, because it would be useless right now :-)
cheers
Jules