Way back in 1993, a friend of mine got himself a computer but instead of going with Windows or Linux, he was using some OS whose name started with a G. I’ve no idea why it came to mind about a week ago, but I can’t dismiss it.
Anyone have a good candidate for the name?
GNU?
GEOS/GeoWorks sounds about right for the time frame.
That’s it! Thanks.
GNU never actually got as far as its own operating system, though, and is most often used with some flavor of Linux. Which means, of course, that in almost all cases, GNU Is Unix.
Ignorance fought! Thanks.
Huh. I never knew they had a variant for the PC.
The C64 version was amazing though, for what it was, which was a graphical operating system with proportional mouse support for a Commodore 64.
I mean, I could do stuff like use a WYSIWYG word processor and a spreadsheet in high school on my C64 without having to have a full-bore PC (which my family couldn’t afford at the time), and it did it better than a lot of PCs of the era did.
Not exactly true:
You can even get a Debian distribution of it now:
https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install
It’s not very usable, as far as I know, but it does exist.
The Gnu Hurd got steamrolled by Linux. It was something of a self inflicted wound. A lot of complacency and no desire to engage with the community, then it just got left behind.
Richard Stallman gets reasonably rilled up when Linux is just called Linux, with no acknowledgement that Linux would never had existed except for the Gnu project. He is of the view that it should be Gnu/Linux. For once I agree with him.
It’s certainly true that Linux owes a lot to GNU. Without it, Linux would just be a useless kernel. Still–Linux is a catchy name, and GNU is not, and certainly not GNU/Linux. GNU is plenty well credited within the OS. It just doesn’t deserve to be part of the product name because it’s a bad name.
It wouldn’t even be that. Before the advent of the Gnu C compiler, it would mostly have been just plain useless. The advent of a free, open source, retargetable compiler suite was the real game changer. You could have used proprietary compilers to create a runnable kernel, but the ability for the community to all engage in development and not be constrained to specific hardware and expensive development suites was the real win.
Compilers were traditionally the secret sauce. Vendors guarded them jealously. You could get the source code for an entire operating system (I had access to Solaris and VMS in a previous life) but you would never see the inside of the compilers. Gnu C changed that forever.
Here’s a link to a website that hosts images and screenshots of many old operating systems that you might find interesting:
http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html
including GEOS:
I’m not an expert, but it looks to me like GNU not being named as part of Linux is GNU’s own doing. When you literally name your project as not being Unix, and stubbornly insist that it’s all part of some new, non-Unix operating system that never actually materializes, then you don’t get to say “Yeah, that’s us!” when a Unix fork starts making extensive use of the tools you released freely.
In practice, for everyone except the folks at the very tops of both projects, GNU and Linux are all part of the same thing. But the folks at the very top of GNU insist against that conceptual merger.
They could have called it Linu.
Well Linux isn’t Unix either. We forget the Unix wars, and the fight over IP that occurred in the 80’s. Unix is the operating system called Unix that came from Bell Labs. Linux’s creation was inspired by Minix, as it wasn’t at the time clear that Tanenbaum’s Minix was free of IP constraints either.
The GNU Hurd isn’'t Unix either. It is based on the Mach kernel from CMU, something it has in common with MacOS and it’s Darwin kernel. Avie Trevanian, who was CTO at NeXT and then Apple was one of the main guys at CMU who developed Mach. All of these operating systems provided a Unix compatible API, but internally there was a lot of difference. Minix and Mach are micro kernels. Linux isn’t. There was a lot of operating systems work occurring back then. Much of which vanished as Linux swept forward. It was very common to provide a Unix like operating environment which allowed for easy leveraging of the GNU toolset. Linux was not the first to do this. Mach for instance provides a Unix emulation layer as a kernel service. Something it’s microkernel structure makes easy. Apple leverage this capability significantly in the manner they provide services.
If you’re going to apply such a fine filter that Linux isn’t Unix, then what is?
And isn’t MacOSX actually based on FreeBSD (which is also a Unix)?
I think Stallman overstates his case:
Maybe in 1991, but certainly not in 2023.
UNIX® is anything that The Open Group certifies as complying to Version 3 of the Single UNIX specification.
According to them, MacOS 13 (Ventura) is UNIX®. I seem to recall that at some time some particular version and distribution of Linux was certified as UNIX®.
There don’t seem to be too many UNIX® now, I remember when everybody seemed to have their own version. All of which fell to Linux, which as said, is not UNIX. Linux is Unix-like, and Unix-compatible, and at this point is only pendants and grey beards that even draw a distinction between Linux and Unix. The two terms are pretty much interchangeable in the real world when discussing using command-line driven software. I have conversations where people say things like “I’ve only used Linux on my Mac’s terminal” (and they don’t mean SSHing someplace).
Back to GEOS: I think there should be more user focused operating systems. At this point, I think there what, five? (I don’t mean embedded OS, but general purpose computing, for very stretched “walled garden” meanings of general purpose).
The two Linux based operating systems have many derivatives and distributions, but I’m thinking of Android as Android whether it’s AOSP, Google, Samsung, Amazon, etc.
You left off ChromeOS.
I’d add OS/2