This is very very cool, and unlike a lot of other "hobby" OSes actually looks usable as a daily driver if your needs are basic (kids, elderly, older/cheaper hardware, etc).
While for nerds computers have become these monstrously powerful things that can do everything under the sun, there's definitely still plenty of people who just want a computer to write down notes, keep a calendar, use the calculator... eg the things home computers were originally made to do.
There is Wirth and Gutknecht's Oberon System. It's still available
but is older than Visopsys -- it was created around 1990, then updated in 2013. I think it's now considered an historical artifact.
I think it's worth mentioning on a hobby OS, just because it's a decent bit more work to do preemptive multitasking. It's a badge of honor to have successfully implemented it.
Speaking of these, does anyone recall the AtheneOS distribution/OS. There’s an archive.org copy of the desktop environment version of it, but I recall there was a really fast version with only 2D graphics and it was a full distribution.
Can anyone validate whether this is real? I tried contacting the guy who wrote it but the Companies House address for his company (Rocklyte) bounced the letter.
Ahh this OS is small enough that a university professor used it as the basis for his class assignments: write a device driver for it, or a pipe implementation, if I recall correctly. I thought it was pretty genius at the time, and it was certainly quite a challenge for the students too.
I took an OS in college in 2006 and the big project that my prof required us to do was to make modification of visopsys. The software was primitive at that time but still had UI interface.
I emailed the author to ask some questions in my project. The author had connection with my prof and informed my prof about this. My prof told me that I was not allowed to ask the author regarding this project. So I had to figured out on my own.
It was fun to play around with and learnt how things work at deep OS level. It was a good memory for me :)
And you guys notice anything about my username? :)
Interesting. Never heard of this system before. It's apparently a monolithic kernel, developed almost exclusively by originally Canadian programmer Andy McLaughlin since 1997. The system has a graphical user interface, preemptive multitasking, and virtual memory. It is implemented in C and IA-32 assembly language. Here is a 2012 interview with the author: https://www.pingdom.com/blog/visopsys-operating-system/.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 65.8 ms ] threadWhile for nerds computers have become these monstrously powerful things that can do everything under the sun, there's definitely still plenty of people who just want a computer to write down notes, keep a calendar, use the calculator... eg the things home computers were originally made to do.
Visopsys - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147201 - Oct 2018 (6 comments)
https://www.projectoberon.net/
Android ? /s Still not able to run 2 programs in the same time after all these years.
https://youtu.be/5MZljgXW2WA
Can anyone validate whether this is real? I tried contacting the guy who wrote it but the Companies House address for his company (Rocklyte) bounced the letter.
I emailed the author to ask some questions in my project. The author had connection with my prof and informed my prof about this. My prof told me that I was not allowed to ask the author regarding this project. So I had to figured out on my own.
It was fun to play around with and learnt how things work at deep OS level. It was a good memory for me :)
And you guys notice anything about my username? :)
That takes me back.
Maybe they mean something else by visual.
First time I saw it was during undergraduate days.... 2006 or 2007?