Bootleg OS

An experimental OS, ideally written in Moonshine

tags: sketchdance

Bootleg is my idea for a tiny, personal operating system. It is inspired by:

• STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming, i.e., the idea of an OS + core apps in < 30,000 lines of code
• xv6 A simple unix-like OS
• xv6, the good parts
• A constructive look at TempleOS
• TempleOS, the good parts
• Plan 9 / 9Front
• Mercury OS A designer re-thinks the OS
• Collapse OS An utterly minimal OS to run on scavenged hardware
• Dusk OS Collapse OS's bigger sibling

In addition to wanting to have my own personal OS to work in, hopefully productively, I want to make sure that Moonshine can also compile and build system of this complexity "from the ground up"

Rendering the OS obsolete

Been talking with Azlen and some themes keep emerging:

• Scopeware / Lifestreams
• OpenDoc
• OLE
• A runtime that can eventually become the OS
• Detaching how systems look/behave from what they do, allow both to be customized independently
• A substrate like Box or DDOM so data is transparently shared among all my devices and also backed up / versioned
• Keep it simple
• Probably the web at first
• Data loosely coupled with transforms as needed. Something like XML or JSON where additional data can be layered on without breaking.
• Implement 80/20. A JPEG interpreter shouldn't need every edge case of the spec, but when it hits something unknown it can send that to a translator (a server that does know the edge cases) and get a simpler version back.
• Never say that we're rendering the OS obsolete out loud