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If Rob Pike is to be believed, the bulk of the effort in writing an OS goes into providing compatibility with the myriad externally-imposed standards that peopl

If Rob Pike is to be believed, the bulk of the effort in writing an OS goes into providing compatibility with the myriad externally-imposed standards that people depend on to get things done and run the programs they need to do so. From what I know of the Newton, it's almost like they tried as hard as possible to be incompatible with existing standards and established modes of computing. I guess it's not surprising, then, that they were able to do a lot with not much code; they completely skipped the hardest part.

S4M 12y ago
It's true that they had much less restrictions on hardware since they were developing for only one type of model, but still it's impressive.
fit2rule 12y ago
>>externally-imposed standards That is the crux of it. I've also seen teams build a complete stack - OS to App - in short order in similar fashion in the industrial embedded computing world .. it seems to be that a tight, motivated team, really can pull of extreme wonders when it works right for the specific, internally-agreed-/co-created feature set. The scale aspect is actually arbitrary; but if you have a group of people who are willing to complete the stack, full-system wise, the scale is a human factor, observed after application; i.e. its not inherent to the subject of software development that there is some dividing line between the 'difficulties' of the whole system development ethos, but rather a function of the differences, and/or similarities, of the people involved, doing something with 'the' technology .. which is after all little more than a social imposition in the first place.