8 ms·

Why Some Dead OSes Still Matter (2007) [pdf]

60 points by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

dasil003 11y ago
The political factors that led to the adoption of Linux as a defacto standard are endlessly interesting to me. As programmers we like to think of ourselves as objective to the hilt, but the reality is that at some point the pragmatic choice is to capitulate to a common standard for the sake of higher-level efforts. In many ways this is purely a political decision because we don't yet see the fallout from the tradeoffs made, and by the time we do it's too late to go back and rebuild the foundations. We can't go back now and replace UNIX because we've too much invested in it and there's work to be done.
- cmbaus 11y ago
  What political factors are you referring to? I think Linux took off because it was easily accessible and widely available, and Linus made a lot of pragmatic choices. I remember in the 90s how awesome it seemed to get a *nix system for free with a book.
  - mzs 11y ago
    I cannot speak for anyone else but personally in college I went linux instead of a BSD on my desk cause the whole AT&T law suit was still pretty murky and frightening to me.
  - jimjimjim 11y ago
    It was pretty much the focal point and poster child for open source (even before open source was picked up as the phrase to describe the movement). back then it was everybody versus microsoft.
  - cturner 11y ago
    IBM's investment in Linux was political. For decades, IBM's identity was as a platform company. It was becoming a regular loser outside of its enterprise monopoly. It was late to the party on home computing. It created the PC but still lost control of the platform. It tried to recover with OS/2. It was a pretty good platform but they couldn't get the details right. This was was fizzing as well. Around 1996 they made a pivot. They invested heavily to recreate themselves as a company who sold services based on Windows NT. This was a desperate move, but it worked - by the late 90s they had reinvented themselves as a services business. One of the stories of the late 90s was the way that IBM had reinvented themselves. Then, shrewdly, they invested heavily in Linux. At a time, FreeBSD was still a much better platform. But Linux had the GPL behind it. The GPL forces people to release changes. This sabotaged the commercial software market, which IBM had already lost. IBM could continue to charge for services and retain their hardware monopoly. This has hurt competitors who had strong footholds in software but who who were less strong in services (Sun, Oracle).
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      > It tried to recover with OS/2. It was a pretty good platform but they couldn't get the details right. This was was fizzing as well. Well, it locked up the PS/2 hardware with patents, so nobody could clone it. So non-PS/2 hardware was a lot cheaper, because there were a hundred companies trying to sell it. But that cheaper hardware didn't run OS/2 (at least initially). But when Microsoft was able to keep pace (more or less) with Windows, nobody wanted the PS/2, because Windows on commodity hardware was good enough, and less expensive.
      - cturner 11y ago
        > Well, it locked up the PS/2 hardware with patents, so nobody could clone it. The "IBM Compatible" was already well-established though. PS2 architecture plays were an attempt for them to get relevant again, and it didn't work. The main technology that they had was EISA, and there wasn't much edge from having that. > cheaper hardware didn't run OS/2 I don't think that's quite right. A mate had a PS2 that was bundled with OS/2 4 in 1996. We found that the OS/2 install disks that were bundled with his PS2 wouldn't install to other systems. But I never had trouble getting shrinkwrapped os/2 running on commodity ISA or VESA bus hardware - 2.0, 2.1, 3, 4. I ran it as my main desktop for five years. You did have a poor experience if you didn't have a well-supported video card, and almost nothing was well-supported.
        AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        I stand corrected.
        cturner 11y ago
        Had a wake-at-4am. The prop IBM arch wasn't EISA, it was Micro Channel. (thanks)
  - kragen 11y ago
    Yeah, the political factor was that I didn't know anybody who had a copy of Plan 9 to give me, because Bell Labs had a government-granted monopoly on giving people copies of Plan 9. Meanwhile my uncle was sending me SLS disks...
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Yet the way I see it there is more OS research going on with unikernels and at Microsoft Research labs than with Linux. Which appears just to be the same old idea of UNIX and mainframes revamped in new package, stuck in C and in a kernel model that has hardly changed. EDIT: To clarify. Many use GNU/Linux in the same way as they would be using UNIX SYSTEM V, there is hardly any change. Add to it that besides new filesystems, adoption of mainframe virtualization and sandboxes concepts, there is hardly anything new happening in OS research in regards to Linux. What I currently care about is OS research that tries to mimick the Xerox PARC experiences, use of micro-kernels, use of safe systems programming languages and so forth.
  - ben_bai 11y ago
    Minix 3 seems interesting. But for the foreseeable future C seems to be the language of choice for OS development.
    - silon7 11y ago
      Rust is safe(r) and could be integrate/replace with C incrementally.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        In theory yes, but I don't think a UNIX clone will adopt it as such. It is a matter of culture. Better in other OS that are already researching alternative systems programming languages.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Yet the way I see it there is more OS research going on with unikernels and at Microsoft Research labs than with Linux. Unikernels are just the logical continuation of exokernels, except designed to run under a bare metal hypervisor. Though still excellent to see libOS taken to its limits, I find the task of actually turning a full workstation operating system into a secure multi-tenant distributed cluster system to be more versatile, as you could then tailor it to both general-purpose and special tasks, libOS being firmly in the latter - deploying applications. Singularity was great, though it seems to have stagnated.
- rbanffy 11y ago
  > the pragmatic choice is to capitulate to a common standard for the sake of higher-level efforts. That's being very objective. Technical merits can only get you so far. One should never be too attached to them.
  - dasil003 11y ago
    Sure, but this only gets you to a local maximum because eventually you pass the point where it is objectively worth it to revisit the foundations of computing. This is the downside of human sentience and global communication where we are incapable of exploring different paths in an evolutionary fashion because we know it's not worth it unless a critical mass joins us, and we know a critical mass will never join us on something that is too foundational across existing bodies of work.
michaelwww 11y ago
The authors worry that the ideas in Plan 9 will be lost if more people don't take it up, but I wonder if that is true if many of the original authors are still alive, creating software and teaching others? Only Dennis Ritchie has left us. The Plan 9 team was initially led by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom, with support from Dennis Ritchie as head of the Computing Techniques Research Department. Over the years, many notable developers have contributed to the project including Brian Kernighan, Tom Duff, Doug McIlroy, Bjarne Stroustrup and Bruce Ellis. [Wikipedia]
stuaxo 11y ago
When I tried it years ago I was put off by the UI, this might be shallow, but if I ha been able to use Gtk and Qt apps ai might have used it looks my enough to appreciate the underlying aspects. The UX is just quite odd and looks old - making it themeable would certainly have made it more appealing to my younger self.
- nicklaf 11y ago
  To be completely honest, the kind of person who cares about UI look & feel above all else isn't likely to get a whole lot out of a research system like Plan 9.
- cturner 11y ago
  The UI does obscures the best of plan9. There are defenders of it. But, if we assume that the goal of Plan9 was to obsolete unix with something better by the late 90s, the UI is a big part of the failure. It scared people users. Your alternative doesn't work. Qt in particular is a platform that goes out of its way to obscure the underlying platform. You could probably use GTK in a 9er way. Still, it wouldn't make sense for applications - the apps written on GTK for unix or windows don't stick close to the everything-is-a-file approach. They are monolithic and beige. Winning users to Plan9 is particularly difficult because part of the vision is about creating a network, rather than a computer. From this, it follows that it doesn't make sense to have sshd run on it. I think the community made a mistake here. If they'd offered a sshd entrypoint, it would have offered a path-to-adoption for new users coming from a unix background. On the path they've taken, there's a high barrier to entry to anyone wanting to do work with it in a non-pure way. If it had ssh, you could sneak it into enterprise. That's not practical for plan9 in its its current form.
  - stonogo 11y ago
    What you're talking about is using plan 9 to do unix things, and there is no benefit to that. Plan 9 is a real distributed system, not a loosely-connected pile of autonomous units. Trying to gain any benefit of the plan 9 architecture by crippling it with an overengineered telex emulator is missing the point entirely. Not to mention the fact that ssh has existed for plan 9 for as long as there has been ssh. Plan 9 is older than ssh. Plan 9 also supported rsh and all the other awful unix communications protocols. They never gained popularity with plan 9 users because superior alternatives existed, which made better use of the OS abilities.
vt240 11y ago
Off topic question. I used BeOS for years and it was the platform I learned C++ on. I just checked out the Wikipedia page and it was pretty unclear on what ever happened. Anyone know where the OS ended up, seems like such a loss.
- owyn 11y ago
  It ended up as Haiku: https://www.haiku-os.org https://www.haiku-os.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) It's linked from the wikipedia BeOS page but not prominently...
  - vt240 11y ago
    Yea, I saw that on there. But it appeared from the page they were doing a total rewrite. Anyway, those were weird days with all those PREP boxes, scattershot OS development from Apple. Booting up into BeOS for the first time and the whole development experience was like a gift from god. Anyway, thanks for the link.
    - niklasni1 11y ago
      Haiku does not contain any code from BeOS, except the filemanager and launcher, which were open souced by Be before they folded. It is a complete rewrite, done by volunteers.
- michaelwww 11y ago
  I have the open source knock-off Haiku running in VirtualBox, but that's probably not your question. BeOS proper was sold to Access: In September 2005, ACCESS acquired PalmSource, the owner of the Palm OS and BeOS. The company has used these assets and expertise to create the Access Linux Platform, an open-source Linux-based platform for smartphones and other mobile devices [Wikipedia]
- dnautics 11y ago
  same here. A lot of BeOS lives on in android. Romain Guy was a huge contributor to the kernel (file system, I think) and I notice his name float by in the photo creds for my chromecast. Dianne Hackborn also works for Android, when I first coded in dalvik Java there were definitely concepts that floated in from BeOS inter-process communication.
DonaldFisk 11y ago
There were quite a few non-Unix influenced operating systems that are even more worth learning about, but it seems hardly anyone knows about them or remembers them. Worthy of mention are: ITS (http://victor.se/bjorn/its/ http://victor.se/bjorn/its/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Syste...) This was the original hacker system, developed and used at the AI Lab at MIT. Genera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_%28operating_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_%28operating_system%29) and the other Lisp Machine OSes. EROS (http://eros-os.org/eros.html http://eros-os.org/eros.html), a more modern research system. Also worthy of mention are the various mainframe operating systems, particularly MCP (Burroughs) and VME/B (ICL). These are all quite different to both the present day operating systems, and in many ways they were better. If all people know about are Unix-like systems (and the not too different Microsoft Windows), there will be far fewer ideas for how to improve them, never mind improving upon them.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Supporting your point about Genera: http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm Modern stuff caught up to quite a few of these. However, we still don't have a platform where (a) entire system from kernel to apps is in same language, (b) apps can use any code in system for their benefit, and (c) any problem anywhere can be debugged by loading up relevant source and current running state. I thought (b) was cool but (c) would be a godsend for troubleshooting. Brings new (old?) meaning to "full-stack developer." ;)
- trentnelson 11y ago
  > if all people know about are Unix-like systems (and the not too different Microsoft Windows) UNIX and Windows (VMS) are fundamentally different on just about every level. (Some more recent notes: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/framework-benchmarks/vtTvwpTeznI https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/framework-benchmarks...)
  - DonaldFisk 11y ago
    Except presumably things like hierarchical file systems and access based around permissions, non-atomic system calls, and very similar graphical user interfaces. The differences between the other systems I mentioned (ITS, Genera, EROS) and Unix are even more striking.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
DonaldFisk already mentioned some good OS's. I'll add a few other examples here with things worth copying plus extend two of his. CTOS was Plan 9 of mainframe world. Unisys killed it for a reason. Imagine LISP-like macros and debugger at assembler level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTOS Genode Architecture (very active development) http://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/ http://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/ Architectural overview of QNX (commercially available) http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~voelker/cse221/papers/qnx-paper92.pdf http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~voelker/cse221/papers/qnx-paper92.pd... MorphOS continues Amiga tradition of being lightweight, ultra-responsive, and beautiful http://www.morphos-team.net/ http://www.morphos-team.net/ I wouldn't mind a Burroughs on a Chip today given details below http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burroughs%20B-5000.htm http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr... IBM's System/38 was way more secure, reliable, future-proof and consistent than UNIX's design. i432 was also radical. https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/index.html https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/index.html OpenVMS was so reliable admins sometimes forgot how to reboot it. Cluster uptime up to 17 years. What's cloud uptime again? ;) Fairly future-proof software, too. http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/20th/vmsbook.pdf http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/20th/vmsbook.pdf Worried about embedded security? Try a highly-assured, real-time, pen-tested Ada runtime. http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA340370&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA340370&Location=U... Use, debug, and modify the app down to running OS for developer productivity? Sign me up! http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm PSOS's layering and abstraction were used in highly-secure systems such as LOCK, GEMSOS, and VAX Security Kernel. Also used object storage to avoid filesystem in TCB. https://www.acsac.org/2003/papers/classic-neumann.pdf https://www.acsac.org/2003/papers/classic-neumann.pdf Flex Machine had Go-like source code, capability-security, garbage collection, and cross-language VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_machine Microsoft's VerveOS mathematically verified down to assembler. Relevant to meme: Nucleus copied/improved General Electric's firmware design. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/122884/pldi117-yang.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/122884/pldi117-yang.pdf Trying to secure VMM's? Learn from the masters. http://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/cse543-f06/papers/vax_vmm.pdf http://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/cse543-f06/papers/vax_vmm.pdf Trying to secure GUI's in VM's, etc? Learn from the masters. https://www.acsac.org/2005/papers/54.pdf https://www.acsac.org/2005/papers/54.pdf Trying to do robust networking? Learn from the masters. http://eros-os.org/papers/usenix-net-2004.ps http://eros-os.org/papers/usenix-net-2004.ps Trying to have a secure filesystem? Learn from a good one. https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/atc11/tech/slides/weinhold.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/atc11/tech/slides/weinho...

60 points by vezzy-fnord 11y ago

The political factors that led to the adoption of Linux as a defacto standard are endlessly interesting to me. As programmers we like to think of ourselves as objective to the hilt, but the reality is that at some point the pragmatic choice is to capitulate to a common standard for the sake of higher-level efforts. In many ways this is purely a political decision because we don't yet see the fallout from the tradeoffs made, and by the time we do it's too late to go back and rebuild the foundations. We can't go back now and replace UNIX because we've too much invested in it and there's work to be done.

cmbaus 11y ago
What political factors are you referring to? I think Linux took off because it was easily accessible and widely available, and Linus made a lot of pragmatic choices. I remember in the 90s how awesome it seemed to get a *nix system for free with a book.
- mzs 11y ago
  I cannot speak for anyone else but personally in college I went linux instead of a BSD on my desk cause the whole AT&T law suit was still pretty murky and frightening to me.
- jimjimjim 11y ago
  It was pretty much the focal point and poster child for open source (even before open source was picked up as the phrase to describe the movement). back then it was everybody versus microsoft.
- cturner 11y ago
  IBM's investment in Linux was political. For decades, IBM's identity was as a platform company. It was becoming a regular loser outside of its enterprise monopoly. It was late to the party on home computing. It created the PC but still lost control of the platform. It tried to recover with OS/2. It was a pretty good platform but they couldn't get the details right. This was was fizzing as well. Around 1996 they made a pivot. They invested heavily to recreate themselves as a company who sold services based on Windows NT. This was a desperate move, but it worked - by the late 90s they had reinvented themselves as a services business. One of the stories of the late 90s was the way that IBM had reinvented themselves. Then, shrewdly, they invested heavily in Linux. At a time, FreeBSD was still a much better platform. But Linux had the GPL behind it. The GPL forces people to release changes. This sabotaged the commercial software market, which IBM had already lost. IBM could continue to charge for services and retain their hardware monopoly. This has hurt competitors who had strong footholds in software but who who were less strong in services (Sun, Oracle).
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    > It tried to recover with OS/2. It was a pretty good platform but they couldn't get the details right. This was was fizzing as well. Well, it locked up the PS/2 hardware with patents, so nobody could clone it. So non-PS/2 hardware was a lot cheaper, because there were a hundred companies trying to sell it. But that cheaper hardware didn't run OS/2 (at least initially). But when Microsoft was able to keep pace (more or less) with Windows, nobody wanted the PS/2, because Windows on commodity hardware was good enough, and less expensive.
    - cturner 11y ago
      > Well, it locked up the PS/2 hardware with patents, so nobody could clone it. The "IBM Compatible" was already well-established though. PS2 architecture plays were an attempt for them to get relevant again, and it didn't work. The main technology that they had was EISA, and there wasn't much edge from having that. > cheaper hardware didn't run OS/2 I don't think that's quite right. A mate had a PS2 that was bundled with OS/2 4 in 1996. We found that the OS/2 install disks that were bundled with his PS2 wouldn't install to other systems. But I never had trouble getting shrinkwrapped os/2 running on commodity ISA or VESA bus hardware - 2.0, 2.1, 3, 4. I ran it as my main desktop for five years. You did have a poor experience if you didn't have a well-supported video card, and almost nothing was well-supported.
      - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        I stand corrected.
        cturner 11y ago
        Had a wake-at-4am. The prop IBM arch wasn't EISA, it was Micro Channel. (thanks)
- kragen 11y ago
  Yeah, the political factor was that I didn't know anybody who had a copy of Plan 9 to give me, because Bell Labs had a government-granted monopoly on giving people copies of Plan 9. Meanwhile my uncle was sending me SLS disks...
pjmlp 11y ago
Yet the way I see it there is more OS research going on with unikernels and at Microsoft Research labs than with Linux. Which appears just to be the same old idea of UNIX and mainframes revamped in new package, stuck in C and in a kernel model that has hardly changed. EDIT: To clarify. Many use GNU/Linux in the same way as they would be using UNIX SYSTEM V, there is hardly any change. Add to it that besides new filesystems, adoption of mainframe virtualization and sandboxes concepts, there is hardly anything new happening in OS research in regards to Linux. What I currently care about is OS research that tries to mimick the Xerox PARC experiences, use of micro-kernels, use of safe systems programming languages and so forth.
- ben_bai 11y ago
  Minix 3 seems interesting. But for the foreseeable future C seems to be the language of choice for OS development.
  - silon7 11y ago
    Rust is safe(r) and could be integrate/replace with C incrementally.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      In theory yes, but I don't think a UNIX clone will adopt it as such. It is a matter of culture. Better in other OS that are already researching alternative systems programming languages.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Yet the way I see it there is more OS research going on with unikernels and at Microsoft Research labs than with Linux. Unikernels are just the logical continuation of exokernels, except designed to run under a bare metal hypervisor. Though still excellent to see libOS taken to its limits, I find the task of actually turning a full workstation operating system into a secure multi-tenant distributed cluster system to be more versatile, as you could then tailor it to both general-purpose and special tasks, libOS being firmly in the latter - deploying applications. Singularity was great, though it seems to have stagnated.
rbanffy 11y ago
> the pragmatic choice is to capitulate to a common standard for the sake of higher-level efforts. That's being very objective. Technical merits can only get you so far. One should never be too attached to them.
- dasil003 11y ago
  Sure, but this only gets you to a local maximum because eventually you pass the point where it is objectively worth it to revisit the foundations of computing. This is the downside of human sentience and global communication where we are incapable of exploring different paths in an evolutionary fashion because we know it's not worth it unless a critical mass joins us, and we know a critical mass will never join us on something that is too foundational across existing bodies of work.

michaelwww 11y ago

The authors worry that the ideas in Plan 9 will be lost if more people don't take it up, but I wonder if that is true if many of the original authors are still alive, creating software and teaching others? Only Dennis Ritchie has left us. The Plan 9 team was initially led by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom, with support from Dennis Ritchie as head of the Computing Techniques Research Department. Over the years, many notable developers have contributed to the project including Brian Kernighan, Tom Duff, Doug McIlroy, Bjarne Stroustrup and Bruce Ellis. [Wikipedia]

stuaxo 11y ago

When I tried it years ago I was put off by the UI, this might be shallow, but if I ha been able to use Gtk and Qt apps ai might have used it looks my enough to appreciate the underlying aspects. The UX is just quite odd and looks old - making it themeable would certainly have made it more appealing to my younger self.

nicklaf 11y ago
To be completely honest, the kind of person who cares about UI look & feel above all else isn't likely to get a whole lot out of a research system like Plan 9.
cturner 11y ago
The UI does obscures the best of plan9. There are defenders of it. But, if we assume that the goal of Plan9 was to obsolete unix with something better by the late 90s, the UI is a big part of the failure. It scared people users. Your alternative doesn't work. Qt in particular is a platform that goes out of its way to obscure the underlying platform. You could probably use GTK in a 9er way. Still, it wouldn't make sense for applications - the apps written on GTK for unix or windows don't stick close to the everything-is-a-file approach. They are monolithic and beige. Winning users to Plan9 is particularly difficult because part of the vision is about creating a network, rather than a computer. From this, it follows that it doesn't make sense to have sshd run on it. I think the community made a mistake here. If they'd offered a sshd entrypoint, it would have offered a path-to-adoption for new users coming from a unix background. On the path they've taken, there's a high barrier to entry to anyone wanting to do work with it in a non-pure way. If it had ssh, you could sneak it into enterprise. That's not practical for plan9 in its its current form.
- stonogo 11y ago
  What you're talking about is using plan 9 to do unix things, and there is no benefit to that. Plan 9 is a real distributed system, not a loosely-connected pile of autonomous units. Trying to gain any benefit of the plan 9 architecture by crippling it with an overengineered telex emulator is missing the point entirely. Not to mention the fact that ssh has existed for plan 9 for as long as there has been ssh. Plan 9 is older than ssh. Plan 9 also supported rsh and all the other awful unix communications protocols. They never gained popularity with plan 9 users because superior alternatives existed, which made better use of the OS abilities.

vt240 11y ago

Off topic question. I used BeOS for years and it was the platform I learned C++ on. I just checked out the Wikipedia page and it was pretty unclear on what ever happened. Anyone know where the OS ended up, seems like such a loss.

owyn 11y ago
It ended up as Haiku: https://www.haiku-os.org https://www.haiku-os.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) It's linked from the wikipedia BeOS page but not prominently...
- vt240 11y ago
  Yea, I saw that on there. But it appeared from the page they were doing a total rewrite. Anyway, those were weird days with all those PREP boxes, scattershot OS development from Apple. Booting up into BeOS for the first time and the whole development experience was like a gift from god. Anyway, thanks for the link.
  - niklasni1 11y ago
    Haiku does not contain any code from BeOS, except the filemanager and launcher, which were open souced by Be before they folded. It is a complete rewrite, done by volunteers.
michaelwww 11y ago
I have the open source knock-off Haiku running in VirtualBox, but that's probably not your question. BeOS proper was sold to Access: In September 2005, ACCESS acquired PalmSource, the owner of the Palm OS and BeOS. The company has used these assets and expertise to create the Access Linux Platform, an open-source Linux-based platform for smartphones and other mobile devices [Wikipedia]
dnautics 11y ago
same here. A lot of BeOS lives on in android. Romain Guy was a huge contributor to the kernel (file system, I think) and I notice his name float by in the photo creds for my chromecast. Dianne Hackborn also works for Android, when I first coded in dalvik Java there were definitely concepts that floated in from BeOS inter-process communication.

DonaldFisk 11y ago

There were quite a few non-Unix influenced operating systems that are even more worth learning about, but it seems hardly anyone knows about them or remembers them. Worthy of mention are: ITS (http://victor.se/bjorn/its/ http://victor.se/bjorn/its/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Syste...) This was the original hacker system, developed and used at the AI Lab at MIT. Genera (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_%28operating_system%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_%28operating_system%29) and the other Lisp Machine OSes. EROS (http://eros-os.org/eros.html http://eros-os.org/eros.html), a more modern research system. Also worthy of mention are the various mainframe operating systems, particularly MCP (Burroughs) and VME/B (ICL). These are all quite different to both the present day operating systems, and in many ways they were better. If all people know about are Unix-like systems (and the not too different Microsoft Windows), there will be far fewer ideas for how to improve them, never mind improving upon them.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Supporting your point about Genera: http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm Modern stuff caught up to quite a few of these. However, we still don't have a platform where (a) entire system from kernel to apps is in same language, (b) apps can use any code in system for their benefit, and (c) any problem anywhere can be debugged by loading up relevant source and current running state. I thought (b) was cool but (c) would be a godsend for troubleshooting. Brings new (old?) meaning to "full-stack developer." ;)
trentnelson 11y ago
> if all people know about are Unix-like systems (and the not too different Microsoft Windows) UNIX and Windows (VMS) are fundamentally different on just about every level. (Some more recent notes: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/framework-benchmarks/vtTvwpTeznI https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/framework-benchmarks...)
- DonaldFisk 11y ago
  Except presumably things like hierarchical file systems and access based around permissions, non-atomic system calls, and very similar graphical user interfaces. The differences between the other systems I mentioned (ITS, Genera, EROS) and Unix are even more striking.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

DonaldFisk already mentioned some good OS's. I'll add a few other examples here with things worth copying plus extend two of his. CTOS was Plan 9 of mainframe world. Unisys killed it for a reason. Imagine LISP-like macros and debugger at assembler level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTOS Genode Architecture (very active development) http://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/ http://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/ Architectural overview of QNX (commercially available) http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~voelker/cse221/papers/qnx-paper92.pdf http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~voelker/cse221/papers/qnx-paper92.pd... MorphOS continues Amiga tradition of being lightweight, ultra-responsive, and beautiful http://www.morphos-team.net/ http://www.morphos-team.net/ I wouldn't mind a Burroughs on a Chip today given details below http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burroughs%20B-5000.htm http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr... IBM's System/38 was way more secure, reliable, future-proof and consistent than UNIX's design. i432 was also radical. https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/index.html https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/index.html OpenVMS was so reliable admins sometimes forgot how to reboot it. Cluster uptime up to 17 years. What's cloud uptime again? ;) Fairly future-proof software, too. http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/20th/vmsbook.pdf http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/20th/vmsbook.pdf Worried about embedded security? Try a highly-assured, real-time, pen-tested Ada runtime. http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA340370&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA340370&Location=U... Use, debug, and modify the app down to running OS for developer productivity? Sign me up! http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm PSOS's layering and abstraction were used in highly-secure systems such as LOCK, GEMSOS, and VAX Security Kernel. Also used object storage to avoid filesystem in TCB. https://www.acsac.org/2003/papers/classic-neumann.pdf https://www.acsac.org/2003/papers/classic-neumann.pdf Flex Machine had Go-like source code, capability-security, garbage collection, and cross-language VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_machine Microsoft's VerveOS mathematically verified down to assembler. Relevant to meme: Nucleus copied/improved General Electric's firmware design. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/122884/pldi117-yang.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/122884/pldi117-yang.pdf Trying to secure VMM's? Learn from the masters. http://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/cse543-f06/papers/vax_vmm.pdf http://www.cse.psu.edu/~trj1/cse543-f06/papers/vax_vmm.pdf Trying to secure GUI's in VM's, etc? Learn from the masters. https://www.acsac.org/2005/papers/54.pdf https://www.acsac.org/2005/papers/54.pdf Trying to do robust networking? Learn from the masters. http://eros-os.org/papers/usenix-net-2004.ps http://eros-os.org/papers/usenix-net-2004.ps Trying to have a secure filesystem? Learn from a good one. https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/atc11/tech/slides/weinhold.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/atc11/tech/slides/weinho...