Web OS? Not an OS

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/03/Not-an-OS

by naish • 18 years ago

20 3 18 years ago

mxh• 18 years ago

Bray's conclusion, as I understand it, is that there is no "Web OS". I think he's wrong, because he's not looking in the right place.

"OS"es started as collections of low-level utility code that helped apps run on particular pieces of hardware. Code that loaded programs, provided low-level I/O services (Bray bags on the primitiveness of OS services, but they're much better than talking to h/w devices directly), helped with memory management, and so on.

The web doesn't really have hardware, but it definitely needs abstractions and utility code. So I'd say the "Web OS" is something like Mochikit, or Dojo, or Prototype, or any other big honking JS framework that abstracts away client-side nastiness.

At any rate, that seems the part of the "Web" that's most analogous to a traditional OS, and something usefully modeled as such.

zach• 18 years ago

The concept of a "web OS" makes only slightly more sense than that of an "email OS."

ojbyrne• 18 years ago

"low-level utility code that helped apps run on particular pieces of hardware."

s/low-level utility code/APIs/

s/particular pieces of hardware/individual websites/

Web OS? Not an OS

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