[Colchester] I'm Confused!!!

[Wayland Sothcott]

toby wrote:
> The Amiga OS and all the the non-Unix type OS don't really work on a
> modern PC because of the hardware architecture right? or so I
> believed...  
>         
> So an OS really need to be a sub-directory of UNIX, for example, Linux
> or BSD to be able to work on the majority of home computers... Not
> including the hardware that do not Open Source there coding like, for
> example, some video cards..
>         
> I really do not understand how the SkyOS have written the kernel from
> nothing and so it is all there own coding and yet been able to get the
> OS to work on the majority of machines?
>         
> Don't get me wrong I don't think it worth the 30 Euros to download the
> apparently non UNIX OS because not a lot of application work on it and
> it depends on Elimination software to run most Linux applications. I'm
> just curious on how they managed to write an OS that is not related to
> UNIX in any way...
>         
> What is noticeable is that the team are keeping the coding very tight to
> themselves and only a few trusted developers actually have access to
> it.... Makes you wonder...
>         
> Thanks
>         
> Toby    
>          
>
>
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>   
An operating system provides a software platform for programs and 
services. Any computer can emulate any other computer provided it has 
sufficent resources. Since the operating system is the interface between 
that hardware and the software then any program written to the operating 
system can run on any hardware. Drivers are the part of the operating 
system that connects to specific hardware and to the operating system in 
a standard way.

The Amega operating system was developed before the Amega was thought of 
so they did not know exactly what hardware it would be used on. At the 
time there were a number of CP/M OS computers using the Z80 and a 
varient was T.OS Thats Jack Trammel Operating System for the Atari ST. 
The graphical part was GEM which also worked on CP/M and MSDOS machines. 
GEM was the rest of the worlds version of Apple and required reletively 
low resources. The Amega OS was more advanced and worked well due to all 
the fancy hardware acelleration that Comodore put in the Amega. This was 
mid 1980's.

In about 1989 the IBM PS/2 machine came out with OS/2 which was 
co-developed with Microsoft. The was a whole operating system not just a 
GUI. I had a machine with 3Megs of RAM when everyone else had 640k. It 
still was not enough to make OS/2 any good. Windows 2.0 worked a bit 
better but it sat on top of DOS 5.

The whole industry changed with Windows 3.0 in 1991 or so, since that 
was the first version of Windows that was any good. It changed again 
when Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups came out. Windows on the 486 
had arrived and the home computer of the 1980's was totally dead.

At around this time Linux was being developed, although most of us would 
not have heard of it.

Windows changed again with the release of NT, this was a new operating 
system with the same look at Windows 3.0. Vista is a decendant of NT. 
People were still using OS/2 and Novell Netware but Microsoft pushed 
hard for people to switch to NT.

Novell Netware was a networked server based operating system that was 
super reliable. It could use a standard PC but mostly it was sold on 
special expensive server hardware. I have seen hard working Netware 
servers that have been running without a reboot for a year and a half.

Windows has come to dominate in every area of computing, even in those 
places where a better one was dominant. Linux is unlikely to beat 
windows purely by virtue of being better.

The Live CD's available with Linux are valuable. However we should do 
some Linux marketing. We should put a Hosted on Linux server logos on 
our websites. I just now thought of that so here goes.....