Comment by nivertech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nivertech | Hacker News Reader

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I used XINU to study OS course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinu

Xinu is a small, elegant, multitasking Operating System supporting the following features:

    * Concurrent Processing
    * Message Passing
    * Ports
    * Semaphores
    * Memory Management
    * Buffer Pools
    * Uniform Device I/O
    * Shell
    * Tcl
    * TCP/IP

Xinu was originally designed as a vehicle for teaching Operating System design concepts and is used by many educational institutions for this purpose. Later versions supported TCP/IP, these versions are often used in Data Communications courses.

I also used Xinu in my O/S course. I'll mention that one of Doug Comer's (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Comer) intentions with Xinu was to purposefully make a different design decision than Unix when pedagogically relevant. For example, instead of treating everything like a file (Unix/Linux) everything is treated like a device.

Its various iterations over the year do not necessarily remain true to that principle, but it is something different about the O/S.

Interesting project, but it's name sounds too much like Xenu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu .

Actually, it's Unix backwards, but surely you knew that.

As well as being Unix backwards, it's also a recursive acronym; Xinu is not Unix.

You say that like it's a bad thing. ;-)

Aliens had much more advanced operating systems 75 million years ago. Imagine which operating systems they have NOW! :-)

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