"Lex Spoon" lex@cc.gatech.edu is widely believed to have written:
There are two senses of OS floating around. On the part about talking to device drivers, I agree with Tim:
[snip] I agree with Lex. In the sense of using an already built lower layer and then considering doing everything else in (Squeak/VW/perl/Ruby/Shakespeare/SNOBOL/whatever) then yes, you can make a better world. However, the track record is not good. No current UI is worth the pixels it's written on. Morphic, thankfully, show promise functionally, but the architecture could do with being architected. (Oh yuck, I'm falling into americanisms)
We could probably do a decent job in the manner the SqueakNOS gang are working, using something like OSKit etc. We could finish the Interval Translator to help with VM & prim generation. We could use J{x} for bytecode translation. We could design our own hardware, like Jecel.
BUT unless somebody can some up with >1$b, forget taking on M$. I already tried it with a promise of 1/2$b and that wasn't enough to protect us. And don't for a moment think that producing something better will be more than 1% of the job.