Hi, I am a full time Operating System Developer for the past 3-4 years.
Previous to that I owned a software development company for about 20 years, just a small one, was not looking at growing as I did not like the existing software solutions and the headaches involved. I have programmed many things from software development to automation and control, oil/gas, dairy, heaps of things... I have been programming for 36 years.
My passion is performance and scalability.
I always wanted to write an Operating System as I felt the existing software was terrible and it sounded like brilliant fun!! But this was not enough of an incentive for me, I had too much work to do, it just was not exciting for me at the time as I could not see what problems I was solving, well problems I really wanted to solve. So just put up, as we do, with the rubbish.
It then happened that I needed hundreds of millions of concurrent connections sending small packets of data every few seconds. I designed a Printed Circuit Board, setup the telecommunications, and the software. But the bottleneck was the Operating Systems and the software that works with them.
So, I then designed a small Operating System to show the customer, they had spent around $100 million trying to get this project going. After talking with them and showing them the concept and where I was at, they said they are not interested in developing the project (they had already tried), but when I have a team and a company ready they are interested.
This is when I realised where I could take the OS (I had designed it for this specific customer), so I closed down my software development company (it was small), I sold assets, moved house, built a server room, signed service level agreements, and started working on the idea full time.
To cut a long-long-story-short, I have an investor for the next 11 months, a new bigger server room, more servers, money to spend on what business stuff is required, and enough money to keep me and my family happy.
We (me and the investor) now have large companies in America, Singapore, to name a few, that are waiting for the next development cycle, and once we prove the next step they are talking about investing, although we might not move in this direction as we have many options available to us and are still to decide.
It is really exciting times, although plenty of programming work to do first....
Ali.
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