Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazyjones | Hacker News Reader

Seconded, but Linux and OSX seem to be the root causes of this (Net-/Open-/FreeBSD people flocking to these).

What happened to all the extremely interesting efforts like EROS (http://www.eros-os.org/) with its global persistence (i.e. can basically recover back to the previous state from switching off the system), Amoeba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoeba_distributed_operating_sy... multiple hosts seen as one) and others that actually brought extremely useful (even from today's perspective) new paradigms to the table?

Most new OS-related efforts seem to happen around virtualization nowdays.

View on HN

A truly distributed OS would be incredibly useful in times like this where people may have a mobile phone, a tablet, a desktop workstation and maybe even their own server.

Having all files, processes and system resources accessible from all my devices would be great.

Not trying to be a MS fanboy here. But, while not truly distributed, this is the one area where I feel Windows 8 might be interesting. I really want to see how (if?) they'll try to provide that experience as it's on phones, tablets, and regular PCs.

Any practical experimentation in this area can provide good insights and help future attempts at other OSs.

At least that's what I hope happens. :)

The Octopus system (http://lsub.org/ls/octopus.html) attempts to do something like that. It builds on lessons learned from Plan 9 and Inferno.

Another Thompson has worked on it with others: It's the Plan 9 project, and later Inferno. Currently efforts are headed right in that direction both at OS and language level.

What you describe is already under way for devices of the same brand/manufacturer is already happening (I'm a afraid make it happen between vendors is going to be a much longer story). It seems to me like a strong selling argument and I don't understand that some big consumer electronics vendor like Sony or LG didn't make it happen already. Maybe the technology isn't cost effective yet.

I think that the next major step is to make these technoknowlegies both user-friendly and programmer-friendly in order to make them mainstream. The innovation the author wishes for already happened 20 years ago. What really needs to happen is that someone take it out of the cupboard and use it.

>What happened to all the extremely interesting efforts like

The same thing that happened to more modest Operating Systems, limited driver support. And since they are a niche already, they had a very small window of opportunity.

The new paradigm seems to have moved to linux kernel drivers/modifications, not unlike Haiku OS, that is able to take advantage of the existing linux stack.

     (Net-/Open-/FreeBSD people flocking to these).

Perhaps on the client side - I'd say that OS X pulled most desktop Unix users away years ago.

On the server side the BSD's and "Solarish" (OpenSolaris derivatives) still have a considerable amount of mindshare in their respective niches.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com