Thinking about it, it’s weird that there hasn’t been any real change in operating systems for about 50 years. Unix and its derivatives seem to be almost the only game in town, apart from desktops running Windows.
It’s because you don’t want to reinvent the wheel all the time. It sucks doing it. Lots of effort. It’s much better to build on existing stuff and maybe improve it for your needs.
But that’s the thing: is there only one wheel? Maybe wheels are a bad metaphor here, but isn’t it weird, that there aren’t any fundamentally new concepts? Unix was developed basically during the preschool years of computing and we all just kind of stuck with its concepts.
I think the last one to make any real headway was BeOS and they’ve been dying a thousand deaths ever since Apple bought NeXT instead of them. Though admittedly that perspective is coming from a person who used BeOS once in the 90s and has never touched Haiku.
Thinking about it, it’s weird that there hasn’t been any real change in operating systems for about 50 years. Unix and its derivatives seem to be almost the only game in town, apart from desktops running Windows.
It’s because you don’t want to reinvent the wheel all the time. It sucks doing it. Lots of effort. It’s much better to build on existing stuff and maybe improve it for your needs.
But that’s the thing: is there only one wheel? Maybe wheels are a bad metaphor here, but isn’t it weird, that there aren’t any fundamentally new concepts? Unix was developed basically during the preschool years of computing and we all just kind of stuck with its concepts.
I have thought the same in my adventures into alternative operating systems.
TempleOS🕌
I think the last one to make any real headway was BeOS and they’ve been dying a thousand deaths ever since Apple bought NeXT instead of them. Though admittedly that perspective is coming from a person who used BeOS once in the 90s and has never touched Haiku.
Plan 9 became Inferno and was quite successful as a distributed OS for network appliances.
What about Fuchsia?
Is that really different? I thought, it’s just a “regular” OS.