🚀 go-pugleaf

Maynard Handley <maynardh@apple.com> wrote:
>
>How many commercial microkernel based OSs are there---those have not 
>been around for ten years. How many OS's with SOM (or equivalent) tightly 
>integrated? Also not for ten years.

Wouldn't know.  I was using RSX when the Peanut became the PC.  With
DOS on it the PC was never anything more than a fancy terminal as far
as I was concerned.  I used a Mac for awhile, and that's all it really
was -- another fancy terminal. For that matter, this is still true.
I use my Windoze machine to telnet into Linux.  They're rather useless
OS as far as I can tell.  I can't start something going and then with
any sense of safety go back to using my telnet session.

>
>Something the people in this thread don't seem to understand:
>UNIX and NT are multi-user OS's. MacOS is (and will be for the 
>foreseeable future)  a personal OS. This makes all the difference in the 
>world if you actually think a second (which I know is a lot for most of 
>the contributors to this thread). 
>In a multi-user OS the focus is on 
>* Security, even if that's a hassle to a specific user who want to run 
>Norton Utils, or even to a group of trusting users who easily want to 
>share data (eg when you log into your friends UNIX account and see he 
>forgot to set group or world read permission for that file you want).
>* "Fairness" in some sense, especially in utilization of CPU time, 
>leading to preemptive multi-tasking with dynamic priorities.
>

I need multitasking and security.  If I can't trust my machine to stay
up when I do something else while waiting for something to complete on
another machine then I cannot do anything else on the machine.  I'm
just as well off with a dumb terminal.

>However a personal system is a different sort of beast. When one is 
>playing a game, or capturing video for example, one does NOT want other 
>processes sneaking in and grabbing time. The user is the only person 
>using the CPU and the user cares about other issues than "Fairness" in 
>sharing time among processes. This means the OS is in many ways more like 
>a realtime OS than a traditional timeshare OS like UNIX. But it's a 
>realtime OS with a whole lot of extra stuff that realtime OSs usually 
>don't have to deal with. It is simply airheaded to say that mac OS 
>designers should be able to look at UNIX/NT/VMS and produce a new OS like 
>that. They are not INTERESTED in producing yet another timesharing 
>OS---if that's what you want, go buy NT, run LInux, whatever. 

I've never been very interested in single player games.  Also, I'm more
used to RSX (a realtime OS) than Unix, and I'll tell you that there isn't
much similarity between RSX and DOS.  The most important difference
between RSX and Unix is that RSX provides fine-grain control over the
relative priorities of processes -- very important in realtime processing,
and a big pain to get right.

-- 
Sphere.

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