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It's cool that Linux started as a terminal emulator so that Linux could read Usenet from home: a terminal emulator and modem interface were within the grasp of
by zeveb 10y ago
It's cool that Linux started as a terminal emulator so that Linux could read Usenet from home: a terminal emulator and modem interface were within the grasp of a bright college student in the mid-90s.
What worries me is that the necessary software stack to do anything interest today is so heavyweight that we'll never see another great hobbyist OS. You don't just have to support WiFi and/or Ethernet, IPv6 and/or IPv4, TCP, parse HTML & display HTML (that's all doable, more-or-less, by someone bright and willing to compromise): you have to have graphics, you need a DOM, you need JavaScript, you need all the fiddly browser APIs, you need CSS — because the MVP for a web terminal is _everything_.
The MVP for an old fashioned terminal was 'read & write to modem, display text on screen.' You could cheat and not even offer paging at first!
- whatever_dude 10y agoOr you could go the TempleOS route and pick what you want to support because they're The Right Choice.
- akkartik 10y agoMy focus lately is on a VPS over ssh: http://akkartik.name/post/mu http://akkartik.name/post/mu. Since that article we're trying to add OpenBSD to that list, as a pretty accessible yet full-featured stack to hack on. Stephen Malina has good instructions here for getting started: https://github.com/akkartik/mu/wiki/Installing-OpenBSD-on-a-Vultr-Instance https://github.com/akkartik/mu/wiki/Installing-OpenBSD-on-a-...
- ksk 10y agoThat's true in any field though. Yet people are still able build their own cars, planes, design/fabricate their own chips and so on. I think its primarily because our tooling has also advanced allowing you to do stuff in your garage that previously could only be done at some factory. To take your example, all of those things are not really that hard. Mainly because a lot of those things are established standards (using the word loosely here, as with anything to do with the W3C) with existing implementations whose source is available. Its up to you to decide how much of the standard you would have to implement for a MVP.
- cmrdporcupine 10y agoI dunno if that's true. There's plenty of projects doing baremetal onto Raspberry Pi or other ARM SoC boards... stuff I've personally put together started to venture into OS territory. Once you have POSIX, porting existing software isn't that bad. And there are web browsers like NetSurf that can run on very simple or strange or stripped down systems. I've seen NetSurf running on one of my 8mhz mc68000 Atari ST systems.
- zeveb 10y ago> Once you have POSIX, porting existing software isn't that bad. Yeah, but the really exciting stuff won't be POSIX. I definitely don't think it'll run C (well, of course someone will eventually port a C compiler to it, but the performance might not be great). I think a really exciting new OS would try to do something radically different, not just reimplement what's been done before (which, to be fair, is what Linux does and why Linux is successful: if Linus had implemented Plan 9 instead we'd never have heard of him). FWIW, NetSurf definitely sounds interesting, but a) it's still written in C and b) it doesn't appear to support JavaScript in production yet. I personally don't care, but all the hip kids these days keep on telling me that the only way for someone to read an article online is to download & execute hundreds of megabytes of obfuscated executable code of dubious origin.