Hobby OS projects (by alaric)
There are a lot of hobby OS projects out there. The Wikipedia article barely scratches the surface; I've come across projects to build Lisp-based OSes, 32-bit multitasking extensions to DOS, you name it.
Lots of people decide they want to write an OS. They look at a world dominated by Windows, with open source UNIX clones and MacOS bringing up the rear, and think: "I can do better". And they usual don't get too far. Even if you do write a full operating system, able to utilise a wide range of hardware and with all the applications home and business users need, you'll still have a hard time getting people to use it - because it's unfamiliar.
I'm proud to say that I, too, am writing my own OS.
You're probably now expecting me to tell you why; perhaps to give a reason why my OS is special and different, so I think it'll be able to beat Windows.
Alas, I am not. I have no expectation that ARGON will dislodge Microsoft, Apple, or UNIX (although you never know what might happen over the next century or so).
But I'm perservering anyway, for a few reasons.
- The one area where new OSes sometimes have success is the embedded systems market, where minimalist computers are designed and programmed from scratch. There's no need for backwards compatability, either in terms of the underlying hardware or the application that will run, meaning there's less intertia for new entrants to overcome. However, ARGON is not primarily designed as an embedded OS; it has an embedded subset, but it's heavily cut down. It's more of an application of the same technologies, where appropriate, to embedded systems, with a view towards producing embedded systems that can integrate easily with 'proper' ARGON systems.
- Because I can't stop having ideas about how an OS could be designed, so I might as well figure out how all these ideas can fit together into a cohesive whole and document them, or else I'll just be left feeling restless and dissatisfied
- Because cross-platform platforms like Java have shown that the boundary between an OS and a platform is blurred. The Java VM is an environment in which software executes that can be compared functionally to the environment provided to an application by Unix or Windows; and it can be implemented directly on top of raw hardware, or as a userland process running on top of a 'host OS'. Therefore, the ARGON platform can have value as a software environment like Java, without the bother of my having to write device drivers or the user needing to devote an entire machine to running it.
Sun 16th Jul 2006 12:15 am 
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By James, Thu 18th Dec 2008 @ 11:13 am
So whens the release? 😛 Wouldn't mind testing this thing with a couple of old forth apps I got kicking around on my drive. -Jim