I’d love to provide commentary worthy of all those, but in short let me say that they are all worth a peek.
I caught up on some reading over the holiday. It was interesting to see an article in the EETimes (paper edition, November 26, 2001, page 53) on Vividon and their streaming media product. The title of the article is OS pushes adaptive streaming media out of lab. I had thought exokernels were interesting, but I hadn’t thought that anyone would try them in a commercial setting.
Bochs
I haven’t gotten around to mentioning Bochs yet. It is a portable x86 PC emulator that runs on most popular platforms. It is quite good. I’ve used it when I played with a little assembly language bootloader and OS code. You can even use it to develop a new PC operating system while running on your Mac OS X!
New Releases
OSNews comes through again, with news of updates to SkyOS, MenuetOS and FreeVMS.
I didn’t make note of it last time, but MenuetOS is a neworked and GUI OS written in assembly(!).
Nemesis papers
I should also mention that I found a few papers on nemesis at the NEC ResearchIndex. For example, this paper provides an overview of the nemesis kernel. More can be found by searching the index.
Links to Hiawatha Bray’s article on Jordon Hubbard and Mac OS X have been percolating around the net.
I found it interesting. On the surface the article seems to put Mac OS X in conflict with other UNIX choices (”pitching OS X as a better Linux,”), but I think at the heart it positions Apple’s new OS within the context of UNIX. More that threatening UNIX (or Linux), I think Mac OS X is taking UNIX (and UNIX standards) to a wider audience.
Housekeeping
I’ve switched from a perl-based to a C-based weblog generator. It is pretty simple (and homebuilt), but I think what it does what I need for now.
Backfill
I’ve also gone looking for a few dates in OS history, and tried to fill in a few of the things I’ve missed. Those backfilled pages start with the words On this day in history …
On this day in history, OSNews reviewed the most recent release in the OS/2 family.
On this day in history, the December issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal featured two small operating systems. In their words:
MenuetOS is a multitasking real-time operating system that fits on a single 1.44-MB floppy diskette – that’s right, a single diskette! Additional resources include msetup.zip (source code).
The MenuetOS homepage is http://www.menuetos.org/.
NewOS is a freely available lightweight operating system written in C for platforms ranging from Intel- and AMD-based PCs to the Sega Dreamcast. Additional resources include newos.txt (listings) and newos.zip (source code).
The NewOS homepage is http://newos.sourceforge.net.