Operating Systems

Seeing as I am not done setting up new computer (I've been pretty busy), I suppose I will post on something else. Operating systems!

While today we only there are only 3 main operating systems (2 as far as most consumers are concerned), there used to be many. Here is an ascii art graph of chart of the decline in their numbers (Please excuse all the `s. HTML and white space don't get along):

```|```/---\
lots|---/````\
```|````````\---\
```|````````````\--\
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`3`|````````````````\--+
```+----------------------------------
```A while ago```````````Today

I would love to go into the details of the research I did to come up with this scientific looking graph, but I won't... for the sake of brevity... yeah, that's it.

As you can see, OSes have become endangered. Each year there population declines, and there hasn't been a new OS in years. If we aren't careful, we may lose the majestic species forever!

Well, obviously OSes aren't going anywhere for a while, and we probably won't see any of the big three disappear (although it can be argued that Mac's OS is starting to resemble a Linux distro more than a completely separate OS since it is now based off of BSD (to be honest, I'm not really sure what the difference between BSD and Linux is)).

Have OSes really just become so complicated that it's not feasible to build a new one from scratch? Are we going to just continue to add on to what we already have?

Well, I found some people that don't think so: http://www.osdev.org/. I would suggest checking out the wiki, it has everything you could ever need to get started on a brand new OS. Even if you never plan on trying (like me), it is still interesting as a reminder to just how much goes into one of these behemoths. And humbling, to say the least.

So the next time you get frustrated at Vista for being bloated, Linux for being hard to install, or Mac for ever thinking that one button on a mouse is sufficient, and grumble that you could do better, well, now you know where to start. And if you don't think that a small group can put an OS together, check out http://www.menuetos.net/, it's an OS that was written completely from scratch and fits on a floppy disk. I used it back in high school (back people still used floppies), and I'm happy to see that they are still maintaining the project.