Alan Grimes wrote:

//snip//
> 
> >> DOS is, unquestionably, the best OS in existance TODAY.
> 
> > Uhh... that´s not what most people who know a litle bit about such
> > things would say... (actually, from Computer Science perspective it´s
> > pretty bad).
> 
> Absolutly.
> Its miraculous that every other OS I've seen manages to be even worse,
> often much much worse.
> 
> Here's a top 5 list:
> 
> 1. DOS
> 2. Minix
> 3. Mac OS
> 4. QNX
> 5. BeOS

Interesting that all the OSs you mention (with the exception of Mac OS
-- wonder how much longer they'll continue to support that?) have pretty
much made it into oblivion. BeOS struggles on, and I hear that Caldera
(or a branch of Caldera) are still doing some interesting stuff with
DRDOS, but really......

Of course, it's pretty easy to make a great case out for a particular OS
if you narrow the grounds down enough. "TOS is cool 'cos it'll run on my
Atari with 2.5Mb of RAM","QNX is a wonderfull example of microkernel
design", "DOS is simple" and so on. To my mind, that doesn't matter a
damn if the result is something which is slow, insecure, difficult to
scale, can't run on a multitude of architectures, can be blitzed by a 20
year old virus and doesn't have anything usefull in the way of
applications. 

Yesterday I was reading the Torvalds vs Tanenbaum stuff again (it's
available at -- amongst other places -- http://www.oreilly.com). I'm
struck by how long ago 1992 seems and how well Tanenbaum comes out of
the debate as a person, rather than as an OS designer. But more than
anything, the debate highlights the victory of a strange breed of
idealistic pragmatism.



> I hate it.
> Its overwhealmingly huge.
> And it doesn't build under BeOS.
> 
> To top that off its written in C for chrissake! =P

So, what would you like it to be written in? Basic? Assembler? Do
tell.....

>From sphere.txt

"People say that the Graphical User Interface is the solution to all
usability problems. But what if the user is blind? Or what if the user
merely
has better or more important things to look at?"

Yes, the triumph of the GUI is often over-trumpeted. The best discussion
of the limitations of the GUI I've seen recently is at

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/linux/shopper/155.html

(Warning! Charlie is a Perl and Linux man. You won't like some of this!)

If the point about the blind is more than a rhetorical device, you might
like to do a Google search for Blinux.

I think Operating Systems are rapidly approaching the point where they
are simply commodities. You'll just load an OS (or buy something with an
OS pre-loaded) and that's that. We can already see it on the desktop and
the plug-in server market. The user will simply have a nice front end
and won't have to do more than download the odd update and install a new
application. At that point, price, reliability, security and bangs for
hardware buck will be all that counts. 

Cheers

John
 
-- 
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Marx: "Why do Anarchists only drink herbal tea?"
Proudhon: "Because all proper tea is theft."
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