The UNIX point really resonates with me. I'm writing this post from Haiku (http://haiku-os.org), and it sometimes saddens me to see that a lot of energy is spent on POSIX compatibility (Haiku is not UNIX, but there's a compatibility layer that allows trivial POSIX software to compile with very few changes, and makes porting larger pieces of software possible).

This, of course, has to be done. Otherwise there will be a whole bunch of software future Haiku users will miss out on, and a whole bunch of trivial software the developers would have to rewrite from scratch. Oh, and then it would take way too much effort to port Perl, Python, Ruby, Vim ...

These days, "portable software" pretty much means "targets POSIX".

Written August 5th, 2000

"Irrelevant: Does not influence industry"

Two years later came Xen, a systems research project that has definitely influenced industry.

I'm wondering if it's time for a revival of the capability-based OS's of the 70's, such as Hydra/C.mmp, CMU's flagship OS of the time.

Seems like the raw performance is there, and the CPU parallelism is there. Certainly the time is ripe for a more secure basis for operating systems, and capabilities still seem like one of the best theoretical foundations around.

Maybe someone should inform SOSP. By the way guys virtualization is hardly the only thing going on in systems research. As far as the Web replacing the OS... Honestly if HTTP/HTML is the sole future of innovation in computing then that is a bit sad. As for Cloud Computing, well, let's say the reports of the demise of systems research have been greatly, greatly exagerrated. Actually, looking at my dept this just seems to be a pitifully naive view.there are plenty of projects and not the time nor enough grad students to do them all.

New OS stagnation could be showing the trend away from the OS. A return to the terminal? Cloud computing could be the first new step of many. In many ways we may no longer need the local OS.