Niche Operating Systems

Eugenia writes: "So, you think that BeOS or AtheOS are niche Operating Systems? Well, you haven't seen anything yet. OSNews provides a list and short description of the most active and most promising Operating Systems written by individuals or small teams just for the fun of it or because they have a dream of how the perfect OS should be (is there such a thing though?). Some of them, like SkyOS for example, are even quite far down the line in terms of usability and advancements."

How about OS's that should be brought back?

[sphealey]

There's an old adage that every mistake that has ever been made with computers has been made three times. It originally referred to the mainframe, minicomputer, and PC eras. That could probably be extended to at least five times today by adding "client/server" and "web" environments. One of the strange aspects of computing is that everything has to be started from scratch and nobody seems willing to even consider the lessons learned in the past.

Given this, I would prefer to see a list of operating systems in which things were done RIGHT, but which are no longer in use or from which lessons are not being learned. Multics, TOPS-10, and TOPS-20 come to mind. Any others?

sPh

BeOS...?

[joestar]

I knew BeOS long time before Linux. So if after years of existence BeOS is not yet a mainstream OS, I don't see why I shouldn't call it a "niche OS"! AtheOS on the other part, is likely to become a mainstream. If only it could come with many more supported videocards...

Niche - and quixotic

[kingdon]

My vote for the most obscure goes to FreeVMS [panix.com]. Warning: very little code got written and there hasn't been activity in years. But the way in which it failed was interesting: no one wanted to do anything unless it had the blessing of Digital ^W Compaq ^W Hewlett Paqard. The biggest leverage of the proprietary OS was over the minds of the users/enthusiasts/etc. One could argue about whether the legal issues were real, but the free unices managed to get around legal issues with Unix including the setuid patent [164.195.100.11].

Dare I mention...

[Crusty Oldman]

Dare I mention that the Forth language IS an operating system in its own right? Damn good one too!

I'm a developer for ReactOS (WinNT Clone)

[isolation]

Check it out at www.reactos.com

Re:Different types of niche operating systems

[ReelOddeeo]

niche operating systems for PCs, ...can be divided into two categories

They can be divided into one category: illegal operating systems.

SSSCA

Why is it...

[humming]

..that every programmer that thinks he knows something has to either write his own programming language or Operating System?

//Humming

Re: linux need to sort out threading

[Jeffrey Baker]

No genius. The kernel handles the interrupts from the hardware delivers I/O events to user space via a queue. The program can come along and deal with the I/O events whenever it gets around to it.

The kernel is the RIGHT place for asynchronicity, because we definitely know what is happening when we get an interrupt on platform X. When programming in user space, who needs to deal with your program suddenly and unexpectedly jumping to a signal handler? You have NO idea where you are in the control flow. It's a stupid design, exacerbated by the non-uniform way different platforms deal with signals during system calls.

Re:learning from the past

[cpt kangarooski]

UI is better in some respects, but a step down from MacOS, and by no means an improvement to the state of the art.

Security model hasn't changed.

Speed's not amazing, though at least 10.1 is an improvement over the earlier releases.

Metadata's being depreciated.

I'm sorry, I'm not seeing that it's a substantial improvement on Unix, OR that Unix is a particularly desirable choice of OS for ordinary people. (Frankly, they could all stand significant improvement)