An O/S too far

For a long time I’ve believed that desktop operating systems are too complex and hampered by a legacy of DOS or UNIX underlying technology. I include in this assessment Mac OSX, Linux and Windows. A hundred odd thousand files just to manage and PC operating system just seems excessive to me.

Therefore I am interested by the recently released Google Chromebooks. Interested but not convinced. Whilst I would love to adopt a simple network based, dare I say cloud based, computer I’m just not sure that wifi and 3G services are reliable enough yet.

I am also perplexed by Google’s mixed messages on Android and Chrome OS's. When the iPad was released there was a lot of speculation that there just wasn’t space in the market for a new class of device. Maybe this will be true of the Chromebooks. Time will tell, but for now I’m not tempted to buy a network handicapped netbook clone.

Maybe that's why Google are keeping it all very much low key!

The OS of tomorrow

In my early days of computing at school, long before the dawn of Windows, most machines (Apple 2's, BBC Micros, Commodoore PETs, etc.) booted up directly into a BASIC interpreter prompt. This meant that you never ever had to interact with the computers operating system which was entirely hidden from view. Then I went to Uni and was introduced to the world of multiuser computer systems and compilers (namely VAX VMS and Pascal). Soon after PC's running MS-DOS and later Windows started landing on our desktops and the rest is history. The only thing is that I'm wondering if we didn't miss a trick here. For nearly twenty years we've been interacting with an Operating System (i.e. Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) and a hierarchical directory filesystem and the question I'm asking is why?

I suspect that the reason is a legacy hangover. Devices like the Palm Pilot reverted back to the old model of hiding the working of the O/S from public inspection and this trend continues with the likes of iPhone OS, Android and Google Chrome OS. I guess that's one of the reasons why Microsoft are chasing clouds so much at the moment.