The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 5 (of 5)

Internet Operating System

The person who posted the question about REBOL IOS reminded me of a thought I had about 3 weeks ago that the internet, in many ways, could be defined as an operating system of sorts (I probably read that a long time ago in some pretentious IT rag).

My question is, has anyone written something that harnesses this potential, but that has a wider net than say, P2P?

What I mean is, is there software out there that represents itself as an operating system conceptually, where one operates multiple computers that blend the OS with the networking software so that the user/operator cannot necessarily differentiate between the computer and the network....?

Could there ever be an omnipresent software protocol that removes the distinction between the internet and the individual computer?

nonUniq
Thursday, August 19, 2004

One could argue that Google is doing exactly this. You don't differentiate between Google the service and a particular machine inside the server farm.

Chris Tavares
Thursday, August 19, 2004

Do you guys remember a ruby app that was similer to this idea ?

I may be remembering a crack smoke.

speedy
Thursday, August 19, 2004

I didn't know there were any Ruby apps.

UT2004 Fan
Thursday, August 19, 2004

First one that comes to my mind is Amoeba:
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~dbort/arg/amoeba/
(NOTE: I think this project has long since been dead, though; a lot of the links on that page are deserted)

Although, I bet if you Google for "distributed operating systems" you'll find a few other.

Anon
Thursday, August 19, 2004

Inferno sounds close:

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/

John Eikenberry
Thursday, August 19, 2004

Plan 9

http://www.vitanuova.com/plan9

mackinac
Thursday, August 19, 2004

http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/

Kevin
Thursday, August 19, 2004

I think the Oracle Internet FileSystem could deliver an internet OS

Berlin Brown
Thursday, August 19, 2004

Thank you for the links.

I see that openMosix is GPL'd. Neato.

nonUniq
Thursday, August 19, 2004

Andrew Tanenbaum does a lot of research on distributed operating systems; he's written some books on the subject, so I suggest those as a first step if you want to study the subject.

vrt3
Friday, August 20, 2004