Linked by David Adams on Tue 28th Oct 2008 16:14 UTC, submitted by M-Saunders
Free Software/open source often gets a bad rap for innovating. It just rips-off the work of commercial developers, right? Not so, as this Linux Format piece argues. FLOSS has pioneered, or been a catalyst in, some notable changes in the computing world. Several of these innovations are OS-related.
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Member since:2005-08-12
Member since:2008-07-15
I think the point was that you could fit all of DOS on a boot disk (i.e. a fully functional version of the operating system). Of course, fully functional isrelative, and in the days of DOS that sure didn't include graphical desktops or anything like that. True, you had Windows 3.x, Desqview and a few others, but those were third-party add-ons and not widely considered to be part of DOS. Now a days, though, graphical desktops are considered part of the OS.
Boot disks have been around since their were disk drives, though. A LiveCD is simply a progression of the boot disk concept, it is not an innovation. I find the comparison of LiveCDs and boot diskettes to be completely apt.
Member since:2005-07-06
LiveCDs? DOS did this with boot floppies.
A better example would be the BeOS installation CDs, which were simply live CDs that ran a special bootscript that only launched the Installer app and a few other services. That was as early as '98 IIRC, and there was also an old non-installable demo live CD of R3.5 I think.
And in turn, I believe that approach was taken from the way that install CDs of "classic" versions of MacOS worked.
Member since:
2008-07-08
3d desktops? How is that useful?
LiveCDs? DOS did this with boot floppies.
Collaborative wiki editing? Lmao[citation needed].
VNC? How is that a new idea? Remote desktop access is old as hell.