alt Hacker NewsVisopsys: OS maintained by a single developer since 1997
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Surprisingly only one small previous thread:
Visopsys - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147201 - Oct 2018 (6 comments)
This is very very cool, and unlike a lot of other "hobby" OSes actually looks usable as a daily driver if your needs are basic (kids, elderly, older/cheaper hardware, etc).
While for nerds computers have become these monstrously powerful things that can do everything under the sun, there's definitely still plenty of people who just want a computer to write down notes, keep a calendar, use the calculator... eg the things home computers were originally made to do.
Interesting. Never heard of this system before. It's apparently a monolithic kernel, developed almost exclusively by originally Canadian programmer Andy McLaughlin since 1997. The system has a graphical user interface, preemptive multitasking, and virtual memory. It is implemented in C and IA-32 assembly language. Here is a 2012 interview with the author: https://www.pingdom.com/blog/visopsys-operating-system/.
Ahh this OS is small enough that a university professor used it as the basis for his class assignments: write a device driver for it, or a pipe implementation, if I recall correctly. I thought it was pretty genius at the time, and it was certainly quite a challenge for the students too.
it took me a while to find. here is the source code: https://sourceforge.net/projects/visopsys/files/visopsys-0.9...
Michael MJD did a video on this recently :)
Amazing! I find it extremely fascinating that somebody is able to create entire operating system. Not a easy task!
The most impressive thing is being on 0.9 after nearly 30 years
I'm surprised there aren't more hand-crafted OSs popping up on HN. Agentic AI can give you the basics of an OS in 15 minutes. It gets confused when debugging assembly code, but it can give you a good framework and walk you though the remainder of the steps.
Very impressed by the screenshots in the website. This is no small feat.
Speaking of these, does anyone recall the AtheneOS distribution/OS. There’s an archive.org copy of the desktop environment version of it, but I recall there was a really fast version with only 2D graphics and it was a full distribution.
Can anyone validate whether this is real? I tried contacting the guy who wrote it but the Companies House address for his company (Rocklyte) bounced the letter.
It’s amazing how one person kept this project alive since 1997, that’s real passion and love for coding!
It mentions preemptive multitasking as one of its features. Are there any operating systems that still use cooperative multitasking?
Took me a while to realize it's not a linux distro. Incredible!
It’s short for “visual operating system” but there are no screenshots anywhere. That would have felt off even in 1997.
Maybe they mean something else by visual.
Hmmm nice to see the OS is still under development.
First time I saw it was during undergraduate days.... 2006 or 2007?
> PC compatible computers
That takes me back.
Naive question: would using such an OS bring some security by obscurity ?
still getting 403 after a few hours
Just use temple os
I can't seem to find if it has a web browser or if you can install the web browser
TempleOS with a BeOS GUI - that's the vibe
By now, especially in linux, there should emerge an OS that is purely scripts to generate OS. Or is it already ?
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I took an OS in college in 2006 and the big project that my prof required us to do was to make modification of visopsys. The software was primitive at that time but still had UI interface.
I emailed the author to ask some questions in my project. The author had connection with my prof and informed my prof about this. My prof told me that I was not allowed to ask the author regarding this project. So I had to figured out on my own.
It was fun to play around with and learnt how things work at deep OS level. It was a good memory for me :)
And you guys notice anything about my username? :)