has there ever been a really diffrent opperateing system? something other than text command line or “desktop with icons on it”
honestly, I can’t think of another possiblity thats not rediculus… but it seems like there has to be more than command line (dos/unix) or windowing system (windows/mac/linux)
has any other system even been tryed? any operateing systems that have a totally diffrent form, not just modifications of comand lines and windows?
Depends how strictly you define “operating system.” Does it need to include file management?
Yes. Later versions of DOS came with a shell you could run that made life a bit easier for those who couldn’t remember all the commands. It was a menu-driven system–you would choose commands from a menu, which told you what the command did and what options you could choose from.
An operating system is generally taken to be the software that interfaces with the hardware and manages resources. It’s hard for me to imagine calling something an operating system if it fails to do either of those.
The question here isn’t really about the OS, but rather its UI. Non-traditional UIs are a big area of research right now, especially as disabled computer users become more visible.
Yea, Ultrafilter, and that is why I would disqualiy DOS Shell as an “operating system.” It is the precursor to Explorer as a GUI, and it isn’t an OS in it’s own right.
In that line, there are various “operating systems” for protable and electronic devices (despite MS’s attempts to put mini-Windows and everyone else’s attempts to put Linux on them)…
If you are looking at a GUI, there are a few experiments in 3d interfaces (3DNA has one)… but for the most part, people are real comfortable with folders and icons.
Back in my Amiga days, there was a very popular program called Directory Opus. It kinda looked like Windows Explorer, but was way better. You couldn’t really call it an OS, since most of the Amgas OS was stored in a Kickstart ROM anyways. But I did know of some people that booted straight into that program, leaving loadwb out of their startup.sequence.
Its default form was two scrolling text fields side by side, where you could list directories and such. There were rows and columns across the bottom that you could assign to different programs or scripts. You could change its layout to whatever you wanted, though.
Very neat program, I’ll see if I can find some screenshots somewhere.
Well, only screenshot I could find. This is from a site that is building an Amiga emulator, and has Directory Opus running in a window.
http://www.aros.org/pics/screenshots/20000406/dopus1.jpg
There is mucho coolness in that picture. 31 megs of chipram = groovy.
A lot of electronic gear contains operating systems (of a kind).
The set-top box for your cable TV connection has an operating system. Ditto your MP3 player. There’s lots of gizmos that do.
You’ll often see them referred to as embedded OS.
Max 
An OS is not a specific user interface (UI). An OS is a way for application software (browsers, text editors, the kind of things you start up to do something specific) to speak with the BIOS (Basic Input-Output System, which hands the commands directly to the hardware). OSes also manage things like keeping the files in a usable way (via a filesystem of some kind) and communicating with the outside world (from managing keyboard and mouse interrupts to handling peripherals and network connections). Finally, OSes can handle programs as processes, making multitasking possible in some OSes (it’s always been possible in UNIX and UNIX-based systems, like Linux, but it is not possible in any DOS or older versions of MacOS).
Case in point: Linux is, by default, text-only. Like UNIX before it (and still today), the basic way to work with Linux is through a command line. You can only get a GUI (windows and such) if you start up a seperate application, usually the X Windowing System, but you can access everything Linux is capable of (short of rendering graphics) from the command line interface. X is an application that manages the basics of having a GUI and translates things like mouse clicks into data programs can understand.
While in that GUI, you can open a terminal emulation program and get a perfectly usable command line. You can also accomplish things with points and clicks, depending on which desktop manager (the program that determines what your GUI will look like and how it will behave) you have running and how that program is configured.
Macintosh (pre-MacOS X, which is a UNIX variant) and MS-Windows and Amiga have all intertwined their GUI with their OS’s basic features to the point where running a text-only session entails running an emulation of a CLI (Command-Line Interface). The MS-DOS box WindowsXP features is a program that emulates a (nonexistent*) version of MS-DOS.
*`nonexistent’ in that it only exists in that emulation, not as a stand-alone OS.
You want a discussion of nonstandard UIs. OK, we’ve given you a few (with the Amiga’s being one of the most interesting, IMHO). Do you consider stylus-based interfaces seperate from GUIs? If so, look at various PDAs and cell phones for a cross-section of that breed. How about voice-recognition programs that allow the blind to operate computers? Or maybe you could look into VR systems, although I don’t know how much serious research has been done on making VR systems viable replacements for traditional UIs.
“In the Beginning was the Command Line” by Neal Stephenson – A great treatment of the whole subject of OSes and general computer history, and an essential read if you want to understand the psychology behind all of these machines and market forces. (It’s dated in spots: It referrs to the MS v DoJ trial (now concluded) and Be, Inc. as a living entity (now bankrupt).)
One rather popular OS/GUI, that nobody has mentioned yet is EPOC, from Symbian. It used to be the OS for Psion PDAs, but they are no longer in the hardware business, and the OS is now used by mobile phone makers. The default UI is slightly reminiscent ow Windows 1, but apparently the back-end is very flexible. There were large headlines a few weeks ago when one major mobile phone design house decided to change trac from the Microsoft phone OS to Symbian. Their main reason was that it was so much more flexible.
And a popular embedded OS is Linux. Ferexample, the TiVo is a Linux box. So is the PS2. I could probably dredge up a few dozen more examples if this weren’t such a blatant hijack. 
As Derleth has pointed out, any box running some form of linux has about a zillion different interfaces and desktop environments available. KDE and Gnome are the most Windows-like. Sawfish never fails to annoy houseguests.
And the Xbox is a lot more fun to hack than the PS2, if you’re into that sort of thing
I just tried Sawfish and had to kill my X server to get back to fvwm. I hope you’re happy.
Teeny tiny nitpick:
Operating systems based on Linux (which is itself a kernel, not a complete OS, though the kernel is certainly the most important part of any OS) do not use the BIOS for device access after booting. Instead, for a variety of reasons, this is handles directly by the kernel.
Io my knowledge, no other OS behaves in this way.
Quite a few of them do. I work with embedded systems, and many embedded operating systems do not touch the BIOS once they are up and running.
I don’t know squat about Microsoft’s code, but I have the general impression that the win 9.x line (95, 98, ME) accesses the BIOS but that the later NT versions (2000 and XP) probably don’t. This is just a WAG on my part though, based on the fact that Win 9.x has DOS and a DPMI, and 2000 and XP filter all hardware accesses through the HAL, which I’m assuming has its own hardware access routines.