building a PDP11 from the things you find at home

It was thus said that the Great Terry Collins once stated: VMS is a very nice system but gets slagged by Unix weenies. Okay, so it's a bit verbose in the command line, but it is very consistent and the security model is much much better than the ``ROOT IS GOD'' mentality of Unix. It also clusters much better than Unix. QNX is a very cool operating system, which unfortunately (from my perspective) runs only on the Intel platform. It's a true microkernel and unlike Mach (which is about the only microkernel that is widely known) it actually runs fast! And it has an incredible network filesystem/message passing paradigm that blows Unix out of the water (imagine being able to run a program on one computer, pipe the output to a program on a second computer and send that to a printer on a third computer---all from the command line ala Unix?). Plan-9 seems interesting in that it's more Unix than Unix ever was (Unix: everything is a file, well, except for network connections, semaphores and shared memory. Plan-9: everything is a file. Everything). As far as single user OSes go, OS/2 is very nice and rock solid. AmigaOS (pick your version) is also very good, and a very clean microkernel design (even the kernel is treated as a shared library, and device drivers are nothing more than shared libraries. Heck, they stopped just shy of making applications shared libraries, but really, there isn't anything really stopping one from doing that under AmigaOS). There is a lot wrong with Unix, fragmentation aside. Interprocess communication is practically non-existent (pipes? Fine between two processes, but horrible if you want multiple processes to talk to a single process. Messages? Not supported on all Unix platforms, and for systems that do support it, can leak resources if the program crashes and has a high creation overhead. Shared memory? Same problems as messages. Signals? Heh. Yea, right). Threads? Okay, there's the abortion known as pthreads, but half the time it's userland threads, not true threads. And the API is just horrible (and still no decent semaphore support!) Only Linux got threading right as it's more Unix than pthreads is. And I won't even get into the problems with NFS, file locking, removable media and removable peripherals (like modems and printers). -spc (Sadly, worse is better)