SqueakNOS is an old idea that has gotten the kiss of life again. Squeak is a Smalltalk system built by Alan Kay and SqueakNOS is an attempt to remove the OS underneath Squeak. You can download a VMWare playable image from their sourceforge website or you can get an iso and more details about SqueakNOS from here.
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Member since:2008-09-28
Why the hate ? Would you have liked the article if it said "SqueakNOS - Running Squeak on bare metal" ?
Well its 2008 and all of know what an operating system looks like. But thats also a issue - because we are held back from preconceived notions (like everything is a file). So someone is working on a clean room implementation - maybe it will yield some interesting and innovative ideas.
If you went back to 1990 and heard someone was implementing a UNIX like OS from scratch that didnt build incrementally on System 5 or SCO - you might have said the same thing - no drivers ....
But sometimes good things do come out of impractical ideas.
Member since:2005-09-03
I believe you are reading some things into what I said. I am in no way against experimental implementations or innovation. I don't care if you want to try to use an "everything is a function,file,object,kitchensink" paradigm.
All I said was I think all this talk of "getting rid of the OS" is silly. In this case, the OS really just being reimplemented in a way that is tighter with the language's run time.
My reaction is due to all these people saying things like "OMG the internet is killing the OS". Last time I checked you need an OS to run your web server or web browser on. An even in you integrated OS functionality into your web browser (which I am not endorsing!), your web browser would then become both a browser and an OS.
On a side note, I think this project fails to realize that the best part of a traditional OS is supporting multiple languages. Single language operating systems don't tend to last the test of time.
All this said, I wish them only the best, their results will be interesting.
Member since:
2005-09-03
I find these kind of articles to be ridiculous. The only software that can run without an OS are applications which access all their hardware directly; and even so, by attaching to interrupt vectors and the like they are arguably both an OS and an application.
So fundamentally, there is no way to run on conventional hardware without an operating system. Articles with this kind of title are obviously naive and I am stick of seeing them.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a security specialist and systems software programmer with a computer science degree.