Linked by Nicholas Blachford on Tue 13th Jul 2004 21:56 UTC
After personal computers arrived in the 1970's they went through a series of revolutionary changes delivered by a series of different platforms. It's been over a decade since we've seen anything truly revolutionary, will we see a revolution again? I believe we could not only see revolution again, we could build it today.
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in many ways this was like reading the gear books for the good old pen and paper rpg cyberpunk 2020. the talk of multijob, multiprosessor units and so on gave me a flash of the b&w pencil drawing from them for some reason...
a os is nothing without something to run it on. and the original concept of a os was a system that was around so you didnt have to write hardware interface code every time. this is what the linux kernel/os is. it allows for hardware and filesystem access and nothing more. the rest is up to the software that interface with the os, be it file system management tools, guis, web browsers and whats not...
i wonder what would happen if the "drivers" where stored on firmware chips so that when you turned the system on the bios would gather these parts up and create a kind of in memory os from these pars. then it would toss a list of partitions with a boot indicator on screen with a timeout aiming for the one with the highest priority. then it would hand everything over to the "os" that would then fire up a boot program that had only one job, read a boot script and fire up the stuff defined in there. this is mutch what init for linux does. the diffrent parts of the "os" would be running on the chips of the hardware so when you fired up a gui it would be running on the chip of the video card totaly. fire up a mp3 player or similar and it would run on the soundcard chip with a gui part tossed of to the video card for rendering.
i am no computer engineer so i dont know if this stuff could work at all, but i guess that microsoft would be kicking up all kinds of fud against it