[vos-d] So seriously... (V(r)OS Post Mortem?)

[S Mattison]

Hey Peter. Steve here.
Yeah, I had anticipated someone would make an operating system they would
consider virtual. In my offline notes, I have it renamed "Virtuality".

That site is pretty old; Many things change in a year or three. Also, you
are right. What is online is not really a 'design', but more, if you will
pardon my zen, 'a finger pointing at the moon'. I didn't want to give too
much away about what was really constituted by my operating system. Most of
the amazingness-factor would come from the 3d development utilities attached
to it, and videos of the completed environment itself. Unfortunately, the
utilities exist only in theory, and animations exist only in my mind.

x86 is fairly Standard, and fairly Fun. I had it in mind to attempt to make
the most modular (and therefore most compatible) operating system. I wanted
the system to be able to, much like Descent, trim itself down to run on a
386. But you're right. One has to start somewhere. Unfortunately, I had
never started.

-Steve

On 11/30/06, Peter Amstutz <tetron at interreality.org> wrote:
>
> Hi S,   (your mail software doesn't have your first name ;-)
>
> We're glad to have you aboard, and I hope you'll stick around.
>
> I don't think what you have here truly constitutes a design, it's really
> just a vision.  A design would lend itself more readily to a concrete
> technical discussion.
>
> You could sit down and design the whole thing by hand, but in that case,
> why stop at the operating system?  Redesign the hardware!  Throw out the
> old and busted x86 architechture and make something new!
>
> VOS (our VOS) suffers from enough scope creep as it is, without getting
> into the operating system business :-)
>
> You have to start somewhere.  The place we've chose is the networking
> and computational layer and up.  There's lots of interesting problems
> involved in designing a distributed runtime that can support interactive
> 3D graphics.  In fact, I'm going to try and sit down and write out some
> of the grand plans for VOS right now, so watch your inbox.
>
> (oh, for what it's worth, "Virtual Operating System" seems to be a
> commercial mainframe OS made by a company called Stratus.)
>
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