It would seem that I was on the right track over the past decade. The following excerpts from a ZDNet blog, by Mary Jo Foley, and the referenced Microsoft research sites describes research into OS architecture I was writing about years ago when Microsoft was first getting legally slammed for monopolistic practices and delivering crummy software.
My points over the years have been that operating systems were being made to do things for which they were not designed and that the use of legacy code and approaches was hobbling functionality and crippling performance, security, and innovative ways of using every improving microprocessor design and features.
I'd felt that starting over from the basics might solve lots of problems that are the result of renovating and building new additions to an old architecture. This should be obvious, but it's very good to see a willingness on the part of the owners of that rickety Rube Goldberg building to start over from scratch.
The first two quotes are about a "pure" research project at Microsoft: Singularity. The third quote is about a Microsoft spin off from that research: Midori.
From ZDNet:
“The Singularity project started in 2003 to re-examine the design decisions and increasingly obvious shortcomings of existing systems and software stacks. These shortcomings include: widespread security vulnerabilities; unexpected interactions among applications; failures caused by errant extensions, plug-ins, and drivers, and a perceived lack of robustness. We believe that many of these problems are attributable to systems that have not evolved far beyond the computer architectures and programming languages of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The computing environment of that period was very different from today….”
Some more detail from Microsoft Research:
The status quo that confronted them (the Microsoft Research team) was the decades-long tradition of designing operating systems and development tools. Contemporary operating systems—including Microsoft Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and UNIX—all trace their lineage back to an operating system called Multics that originated in the mid-1960s. As a result, the researchers reasoned, current systems still are being designed using criteria from 40 years ago, when the world of computing looked much different than it does today.
“We asked ourselves: If we were going to start over, how could we make systems more reliable and robust?” Larus says. “We weren’t under the illusion that we’d make them perfect, but we wanted them to behave more predictably and remain operating longer, and we wanted people to experience fewer interruptions when using them.”
From the same ZDNet story on Midori:
“There’s a seemingly related (related to Singularity) project under development at Microsoft which has been hush-hush. That project, codenamed ‘Midori,’ is a new Microsoft operating-system platform that supposedly supersedes Windows. Midori is in incubation, which means it is a little closer to market than most Microsoft Research projects, but not yet close enough to be available in any kind of early preview form.
There's not much information on Midori, but that's not too important. What's important is the possibility that as we transition from the PC paradigm to something very different (and beyond the mobile device model too), is the willingness to consider a whole new way of utilizing what we call computing technology. Without knowing more about what Microsoft is up to, and now inside knowledge about what the other interested companies might be doing, I'd like to pose an idea:
Move away from our current hardware architectures. Find alternatives to buses and other limiting structures. Look at hardware design from the same new perspective as Microsoft is looking at OS design. Start over from scratch. And start over by scratching the needs of the folks who might actually find this new paradigm useful.
Computers started as tools for breaking WWII ciphers and calculating ballistics. It was only in 1951 when the first business applications arrived. The first graphical computer game arrived a year later. All of these inventions were built upon engineering principles, the limitations of vacuum tubes and early electronics. We're now at a point where these limitations can be transcended by a bit of imagination.
I look forward to seeing the imagination in action.
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