Custom OS ( was Re: building a PDP11 from the things you find at home

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Fri Jul 27 12:55:01 2001

At 01:43 AM 7/27/01 -0400, Chad wrote:
>Wasn't Plan 9 supposed to be sort of like that?

No, it was more like Rob Pike's vision of where UNIX should have gone.

Eric Dittman wrote:
> > I've thought about this, myself. Almost any new OS wants to work like
> Unix.
> > What I'd like to see is a community effort to make a new OS that does what
> > needs to be done without worrying about being compatible with something
> that
> > currently exists.

There are a zillion flavors of "works like UNIX." Everything from the
command shell is similar (MS-DOS can do this) to "device drivers are
compatible." The POSIX effort to create a compatible library interface
didn't do to well in my opinion either. When I joined what was to become
the Java group at Sun it was in the 'portable OS' group. We were looking at
building an entire OS in Java (Oak at the time.) That effort I think would
be a lot of fun using a compiler that compiled Java to machine code (rather
than using a "java chip.")

--Chuck
Received on Fri Jul 27 2001 - 12:55:01 BST