Adopt a Lost Technology Today For R.O.S.

submitted by Simon Strandgaard writes "When new operating systems gets designed today, great systems such as Amiga, Atari and VMS, seems to get overlooked in regard to their original features not found on other OSes. It might be time to collect and categorize those special unique features under the great/lost ideas wiki, so new OSes don't have to re-invent the wheel and re-innovate." This is all for R.O.S., a "ruby-centric operating system."

Re:Old/new idea

[topologist]

LISP Machines had unified address spaces and a lot more. Looks like the site referred to in the article has a decent summary (I'd add more, but I'm too young to have used them, so I'll leave it to someone with first-hand experience :-)

Re:Old/new idea

[be-fan]

On a related note, there is a nifty project on SourceForge [sourceforge.net] about a kernel that does precisely what I'm talking about. The safe language in use is a natively-compiled, heavily Lisp-influenced language with low-level extensions for kernel development.

Re:Plan9

[AtrN]

Definitely. Plan 9 has wonderful ideas however it is covered by the following patent [uspto.gov] which may affect a development that uses its best ideas.

Re:Bad ideas and good ideas

[JKR]

I'm sure parts of the Registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE?) are read-only for ordinary (non-Administrator) users; if you're right, though, the Registry is even worse than I thought.

On versions of Windows based on a real OS (NT and above) all the registry objects have security permissions associated with them. For a long time you needed two different registry editors because only regedt32.exe handled security, but XP has finally merged the functionality into one program. Most of the OS-related keys have security permissions such that ordinary users cannot break them.

There is a quantity of broken software (Kodak KPCMS, I'm talking to YOU) out there that just can't cope with storing user settings in the correct hive and thus needs to have its global settings made writable by anyone, but this is slowly improving. Now if only Adobe could fix the bug that requires oridinary users to have file create permissions in the root directory. It's not as if per-user temporary directories haven't been implemented since NT4.

Jon.