Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Wed 6th Nov 2002 00:19 UTC
Yeah, I might be just re-inventing the wheel here, who knows? But I had this (original? I doubt it) idea a few months ago and I was meant to write about it for some time now. So, my idea is about creating a new operating system that is like none of the current ones. It would be so different, that porting applications from other "traditional" systems wouldn't be possible. But the gains would be much more important of what we would lose by implementing a brand new new system.
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Eugenia, the first thing I thought of was OpenDoc while reading your article (and then you mentioned it yourself at the end). I've used OpenDoc extensively and the philosophy behind it has remained with me. By the way, you can still use OpenDoc and Cyberdog with Mac OS 9, believe it or not. And there are a dedicated group of people who still do use it. Of course, what happened was the drive to get developers to make "parts" (like your modules) started to fizzle and then, when Jobs came back to Apple, he killed it off completely to try and get Apple's house back in order.
The upshot of all that is that - and it's a shame - we never got to see what it would be like full-blown. There were quite a few parts for some basic things and I remember Claris had alpha parts for ClarisWorks, which I wish I would have saved. But, there was never a chance to see it in its full potential glory. I have often thought that GoBe was, in a way, a sort of morph of that...since they were ClarisWorks guys...and they used the idea of GoBe being document-centric.
Now, the thing is, if one is talking about this modular approach, it reminds me of an article I read in a Mac mag back when OpenDoc was still alive. The guy who wroye it was anti-OpenDoc and said he was tired of people saying, "Well, you can use this part for this and that part for that and so on and so forth...". He said something like, "Isn't this why we have huge, bloated applications in the first place - so we don't have to fiddle around with all these different parts???". LOL, I got a big kick out of that because it made me realize that this was the dividing line, this is where the face-off is: In a modular approach, does one come to a point where using many different moduals becomes more trouble and more confusing than using a big, traditional application? And, I certainly don't know the answer because it never got that far regarding OpenDoc. Ultimately though, I think that is the big question that would arise. It raises questions...like would ordinary users catch on to the modular approach or would it confuse them if too many modules came into play?
At any rate, a great, thought provoking article. I'd certainly give modular computing a whirl!