The Internet is changing. We’re seeing Transparent Gradients with CSS3, CSS-SVG Image Support, and the W3C’s dent in OpenGL & DirectX with Web3D in development.

I’ve been building what I consider to be an Internet Operating System for nearly a year now called “Alien” with the first Application “AlienBoombox” as a HTML5 Replacement for iTunes.

http://Forums.AlienBoombox.com/

(The subdomain for the latest Beta & App Alphas is “Latest.AlienBoombox”)

I believe that using a Virtual Linux Filesystem I can create a Symbionic Relationship of both Client & Server and possibly later on a X11 OpenGL Chrome WebKit / Mozilla Gecko Graphical Web Browser for Self Access & Extenral / Multipule Instance Access as well.

~ Electric Prism

My problem with the original article (and my first response contained far too many acronyms) was that O’Reilly failed to stick to a specific viewpoint so that’s why his article was so muddled. It is not completely his fault: the definition of “operating system” has become vague over the years.

There is the populist view: the operating system is what you get on a disk from an operating system vendor. To the user, the operating system consists of those applications that are installed with the core; e.g., MacOS comes with the Finder, TextEdit, Preview, and a number of other basic utilities. When O’Reilly described Google as being a major part of the “Internet Operating System” he was using this view.

There is the hardware view: the operating system is a framework in which device drivers reside, device drivers being the software that controls the hardware. This is the view of the “Internet Operating System” in which the major players are the TCP/IP suite (the set of rules by which all Internet-connected machines must abide) and other application-independent transport protocols.

And finally there is the developer’s view: the operating system is a set of rules in which applications (user-facing programs) can control hardware without knowing specific details of the hardware. When you say a program runs on Windows or on MacOS or Java or whatnot, this is the view you are taking. The application uses a convention called an API (application programming interface) to make requests of the operating system; moving an application from one API to another is a major undertaking and often requires a complete rethink of its design because the new API’s “philosophy” can be completely different. This is why software originally created for a different operating system feels odd. The API of the “Internet Operating System” is built on the well-defined protocols HTTP, IMAP, NNTP, et cetera.

To say “UNIX is the Internet Operating System” is akin to saying “the HP-4070 printer driver is the Windows XP Operating System.” If you have to mention a specific vendor, you are taking far far too narrow a view (and most likely trying to sell something).

The Internet OS has to be based on the key glue for the Internet age — creating trust because it is how we will navigate between machines, between people, between sites, between data stores and between cloud services.

And who is building this Internet OS? Not the big companies that you’d expect … but smaller innovative companies like Comodo, a security company. They came out with Comodo Dragon, a Chrome derivative but since it comes from a security company it begins to fill the trust gaps that exist today between machines. Future versions of this browser (I know technically a browser is NOT an OS — or is it???) will include more trust tools – like identity verification, content verification etc.

The Internet OS should not be about an operating system for machines but an operating system for PEOPLE using machines. With that definition, only a small company with no stake in the current infrastructure can create a disruptive Internet OS to deliver The Trust Web.

Take that and put it in your OS pipe!

Judy Shapiro

But some said it right on: most users don’t care or even know a thing about Unix. Fact is: there’s a lot of OS’s out there and I’m not even including distributions (say of Linux), versions/editions, etc.

To be perfectly honest, there is an operating system that was designed for networking (or at least it was a big focus of it), but to say it’s THE internet operating system is a bit far fetched!

Is “operating system” like Linux really cohesive?

Ubuntu, Redhat, Suse, Debian … we need different instructions for them for installing Ruby, Python etc.

I am confused.

Calling anything OS is fine if done metaphorically/analogically, right?

But wrong if taken too literally?

I am confused.

Etrhic Minds .

regards,

george

Anyway, to a confused mind like that of Detective Columbo, I do notice that
(1) Users need just a browser and the internet connection and they can use my computing/software/application services etc right away.
(2) My backend service can be in any language(PHP, JAVA, Ruby etc) or on any stack(ASP.NET, Apache, IIS, Mongrel Ngnx, django, google app engnine, CE2 whatever.)

regards,
EthicMinds<br/>

george