this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
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Yeah, makes sense. I think they sort of just missed the boat :-(. I mean, the research that went into it birthed UTF-8, /proc and /sys, a lot of really good things that managed to make it in super-watered-down form into modern operating systems. But I think that if you want to make a modern OS that gets any kind of traction today, it needs to live on the web as opposed to on someone's personal computer, sad to say.
I think if you wanted to get serious about bringing those ideas into the modern day you would need to just rewrite it from scratch within a different context with a different scope.
That's literally the niche inferno and plan were designed for. Plan was designed so that local and remote were abstracted away. Everything was just a data stream. You could run inferno literally in a browser. Which you don't get much more in the web than that lol.
Specifically inferno is what android sort of half was. Android traditionally heavily leveraged java/dalvik bytecode for apps. But the root system was native. The bytecode ran on top of that. Inferno pushed the bytecode all the way to the micro kernel.
I still install other os like all these regularly. The thing that has kept me from keeping them. Is lack of a few basic things like modern web browsers. I hear haiku is making progress in that front at least. I have fond memories of running Be on an old Pentium II.
Hm. TIL Inferno; I read but I still don't feel like I understand it. What I was talking about was a little bit more of a browser-native "OS" shell if you want to call it that... I feel like the kind of ease of interaction that people have on the command line on a Unix system still doesn't really exist for any type of web resource that I'm interacting with. It's all separate systems without much unifying access or principle.
Maybe Inferno would have been the answer (like I say I read a little bit still don't really grasp it), but the WP page seems to say that Lucent didn't really have a coherent way to deploy or market it and so even it being a good idea wouldn't really have saved it from obscurity. :-( Like I say it is sad overall, these things were better than the stuff we have around now.