krfkeith wrote:
So in short, what I want to know is what are, in your opinions, the most bizarre, out-there, off-the-wall OS designs? Obviously, sometimes there's a reason things are done a certain way, but seeing WHY this is, and examples of failures to try and do things differently can be incredibly enlightening. Anyway, yeah, right now, the most 'unusual' (for me) design I've been reading about has been capability based OSes, in particular the J. Shapiro family of OSes. [...] Really interested to hear everyone's responses!
Shapiro's
EROS was definitely one of those moments for me, back in the day. Capability-based security and orthogonal persistence, way ahead of their time. I've followed Shapiro's work ever since.
In industry, at least so far as non-trivial consumer computing devices are concerned, true orthogonal persistence didn't really arrive until the iPad. But poking about EROS, long before SSDs were available, it was already clear that this was going to be the way of the future and that the "Save" button was destined for the dustbin of history. Slowly, ever so slowly, that's now happening.
Another
eureka was reading Massalin's thesis on the
Synthesis kernel. The unconventional ideas therein still seem to me to have great untapped future potential, though admittedly self-modifying code is something of a bad idea on contemporary CPUs these days. But that doesn't mean it will remain thus forever.
Yet a third category of special awesome is anything by Chuck Moore, the creator of Forth,
colorForth, and, most recently,
GreenArrays. Moore has been swimming so far out of the mainstream for so many decades that his creations sometimes seem like imported alien technology. Definitely lends you a different perspective, particularly regarding taking
Wirth's law seriously.
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