Saving The World.

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Mon Sep 3 17:28:31 UTC 2001


"Lex Spoon" <lex at 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.

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: CBA: Compare if Biorhythms Amenable





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