Archive for the ‘user experience’ tag
OS Nostalgia and Disappointment
Ten years ago, when I was starting my computer science training, I was a major fan of OpenVMS. OpenVMS, of course, will not run on my laptop, so I needed a solution to run on my standard-issue laptop. Linux was still in its infancy, especially on laptop hardware, so I began to play around with other operating systems. Eventually, a friend of mine turned me on to an operating system called BeOS. Superfast to boot, BeOS was based around a microkernel and a strong graphical user interface (“GUI”) design philosophy.
Today, the original BeOS project is defunct. A group of dedicated enthusiasts are working to bring the project back under the new name of HaikuOS. While Haiku continues to be as fast and lightweight as the old BeOS was, I can’t help but think that the GUI is stuck in the distant past.
After I overcame my nostalgia for BeOS, I started thinking that GUI operating systems have not done much to evolve in the past 25 years.
