OSNews isn't OSNews

One of the tech sites I follow is OSNews. It was originally a website for...well, news about operating systems. Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.

A recent post was titled "Why OSNews Is No Longer OSNews." The editor outlines how OSNews shifted from news about operating systems into more general news about technology, Recent stories cover news about Adobe vs. Apple and H.265 developments and Microsoft Office changes, rather than developments about new kernel threading implementations in Linux or compatibility changes in Haiku.

The article was pretty good, and I'm not writing to rehash what Thom Holwerda wrote in the article. I am writing because as I read the article and ensuing comments, it actually dawned on me the scale to which computer technology has "standardized" and stagnated.

I became interested in computers and platforms in the dawn of home computing. I was born at the dawn of the birth of Apple Computer. I saw the introduction of the Macintosh. Okay, I didn't see it, but I was becoming aware of the world and computers in 1984 when the infamous ad debuted. The Internet was expensive, slow, and difficult for home users to get access to, so I relied on shopping in local department stores (remember when Sears mattered?) and magazines in bookstores to get news about computers, and Byte and Computer Shopper were chock-full of stories about AmigaDos and AmigaOS, OS/2, the fledgling pseudo-OS called Windows, various flavors of DOS, CP/M,...all sorts of technology goodness.

But gradually the stories about operating systems dwindled because companies closed down, markets dwindled, and eventually the biggest of the niche OS's like AmigaOS were relegated to hobbyist markets. Magazines started changing their focus into something more like Cosmo for geeks; "Win95 vs. OS/2 vs. NT! Which is Best For You?"

Fast forward to today and you have the situation that the OSNews article was discussing; hobbyist OS's are largely stagnant. Operating systems are basically, for practical purposes, down the the "big three" of OS X, Linux, and the Windows family.

Hobbyist OS's that I can name include MorphOS, FreeDOS, ReactOS, Plan 9, and Haiku. There are others, but for the most part, the number of installed systems are tiny. Really tiny.

The comments put the second part of the puzzle in place for me; people commented that in colleges, computer science majors didn't have to take compiler courses. Someone else said that more recently they went to a nearby college and the computer science majors weren't even taking courses on operating systems. I remember when I went to college that the debates focused on what the latest, most relevant computer languages were to teacher...Java? Python? Should we keep C++?

My daughter applied to the college I went to, so I was able to kind of revisit what was going on with their CS program. Basically, it's gone. The college is doing something more like an information technology track rather than a computer science degree that focused on data structures and how the system worked under the hood. This would be akin to people going to a vocational school for auto repair and learning more about body work and adding spoilers without going over how pistons or fuel injectors work.

Basically, we moved to a position in technology where the public has popularized particular platforms, and the focus has shifted into the more shallow but productive application of technology. We aren't teaching data structures or operating systems and more technology-oriented interest have nothing to do with the underpinnings of improving the computer platform, it's focused on applications and supporting Grandma so she can get her email.

I'd love the hobby OS's. I had an installation CD of BeOS when it was distributed to the public for the Intel platform. I disliked MacOS because it relied heavily on cooperative multitasking, and found it fascinating when Win95 introduced preemptive multitasking to the platform (except for the Win16 subsystem, and to a degree I guess the Win32 subsystem addon for Win3.11 had some elements of preemptive multitasking, but still...). End users just glazed over when told why these things mattered. They didn't care because they just wanted to play games and browse the web. While things under the hood improved with these features, they were quiet improvements and added largely because they improved the user experience without them knowing it.

What hobby OS's are out there are relegated to R&D departments (Plan 9) or are so hobby that they basically, for practical purposes, boot up and do little else unless you're using the machine exclusively as a platform for simple web browsing and email (if you're lucky). To get any actual work done you have to use one of the "big three" operating systems.

If OSNews only covered news for operating systems, they'd have new stories maybe once a month. There simply aren't too many people working on operating systems and those that are are working just on operating systems; I can't use it to accomplish things I use every day reliably, and without more development on applications the operating system is largely useless.

Basically one of the things that attracted me to computing as a career is dead. Commoditized. And it's a shame. My first computer was a Commodore 128, and my first PC was a 486sx 33 Mhz system with 4 meg of RAM. Today if you get a new computer to run Windows 7 you really need at least 2 gig of memory and a 100 gig hard disk. But I still remember running BeOS on an Intel system that was only a couple hundred Mhz and something on the order of 128 meg of RAM and it was able to render an animated OpenGL demo without any stutter or pausing. I was spinning a three-dimensional cube on the screen while each facet played a different movie file without stuttering. It was absolutely amazing that something with such a small amount of resources was able to pull this off.

In other words, the these hobby and research (and niche) OS's can do some really amazing things, but if they don't have anything to edit home videos or play podcasts, what am I going to do with it? How many half-rendered or unreadable web pages will I have to work around before it just annoys me too much to use it?

And without users, these projects stagnate and die off. There's very little variety.

This isn't necessarily bad; as technology has become more popular (i.e., dumbed down until the average teenager could waste an entire day playing flash games and sending pointless text messages to one another) variety becomes a detriment for support and usability. It's horrible, but the more choice you give people, the more confusing it is for people who don't love the platform itself. I can relate. I don't really give a damn about who and how my tires are manufactured or what kind of configuration my engine is in my car. I just want to get to the store and run errands without a huge cost. Same for computers. As the userbase shifted away from technology geeks and educated, savvy users to more general Mom and Pop users the operating system platform became more bland and general, and feature lists were focused more on eye candy than on multitasking and memory protection.


Computer technology is going the way of the wild west. When I first became interested in the tech I was voraciously digesting articles that explored the nitty gritty of memory protection and multitasking algorithms and what additional specialized hardware made the Amiga computer from Commodore rock the special effects industry. Today, computers are migrating into appliances that are supposed to be as easy to use as VCR's and microwave ovens and are cheap enough that if they break, the cost to repair them is often higher than simply buying a new one at Wal-Mart. They're becoming civilized and boring.

I'll continue to read what news articles emerge regarding Haiku or ReactOS or a new project that still shows signs of life. I would love to try out an operating system that is niche enough to address problems with my operating system platform of choice or introduce cool and useful features without having to sacrifice my ability to "get stuff done." And I hope that these mini-projects can inject some excitement to the profession (Plan 9 has some really really interesting concepts in it...now if only I could edit video or use it to enhance our IT infrastructure without users crying and whining that it doesn't run Internet Explorer, I'd love to play with it more.)

Otherwise I guess I'll have to either move with the times or seriously look at shifting careers. The excitement simply isn't there anymore. I guess that's one of the side effects of not inventing the future but rather moving with the passage of time.