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licnep | 4 years ago

This is insane, I can't imagine how much work went into it.

I had a similar idea as a kid, I was pissed at all the bloat consuming my cpu and ram on windows so I wanted to build my own os that would run a single app taking advantage of 100% of the hardware. I learned some assembly and managed to create a bootable floppy disk, then quickly gave up, realizing how much work a functioning os would take...

discuss

kingcharles|4 years ago

I did this in the mid-90s when this book came out:

https://www.amazon.com/Developing-32-Bit-Operating-System-Cd...

I knew x86 well from demo scene coding, and I had the Linux and NetBSD sources to help, but the hardest bit was just getting all the boot sector stuff going properly and getting the processor into 386 mode as soon as possible.

I wrote an entire OS that booted into a windowed GUI, multi-threaded, file system support etc, etc and my goal was the whole thing booting happily to the desktop in 4Mb of RAM from a 1.44Mb 3.5" floppy, which it did. Every line was written from scratch in x86 assembler, because I was a masochist like that.

I called it Tinkerbell, for reasons lost to time, and it was hosted at tinkerbell.org back when I owned that domain. I just checked archive.org but sadly they didn't grab it when it was around.

EDIT: 32-bit OS book and the source are here:

http://www.ipdatacorp.com/mmurtl/

JPLeRouzic|4 years ago

Hey, I remember looking at your operating system in the 90'. I do not remember where I find it. It's nice to read about it today.

vendiddy|4 years ago

Very cool!

Do you have insight into why modern operating systems consume gigabytes of disk space and require so many system resources?

unknown|4 years ago

[deleted]

Sunspark|4 years ago

It's a lot of work.

One guy pulled it off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

busymom0|4 years ago

SerenityOS is another one which was posted recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29270776

Video demo:

https://vimeo.com/641406697

torginus|4 years ago

I remember one called SkyOS as well - it was really far along, probably killed by the lack of driver support. Unfortunately it's site seems to no longer exist.

Here's the latest archive of it I could find: https://web.archive.org/web/20171014135312/http://www.skyos....

Also it's wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyOS

unixhero|4 years ago

Yes, and several others since.

amelius|4 years ago

Does anyone use it?