Sorry for being late this week. A plethora of problems, networks that not work, kaput hardware and self-corrupting operating systems seem to have been bugging me this last week. So, a bit late, but here we are:

Professor Andrew S Tanenbaum has had a significant impact on the world of operating systems as we know it today. In order to teach operating systems, he wrote his own clone of Unix, using the most modern design techniques he could think of. (He called it Minix, and that’ll be my OS for next Thursday). This OS in turn was used by a student to start a hobby project. That hobby project became known as Linux.

What he went on to do next is potentially far more interesting and exciting than that.

The main idea of Amoeba will be familiar to you if you run any of the BOINC projects like Seti@Home. The idea is to turn multiple, inexpensive computers into one single transparent system. Imagine it this way - add a hundred thousand Commodore 64s together and you get Deep Thought.

People have been playing around with distributed programming like this for ages - witness the language Occam, for example - but this didn’t really hold enough scope for the Amoeba system. So they designed and wrote their own programming language - Orca (which I’ll talk about later in the week) - designed to make this task easy (well, easier than in Occam anyway).

It’s basically a research OS (which for those of us not researching parallel operating systems essentially means nobody’s ported Firefox to it yet), although the interface is a standard X window interface (X11R6, basically). However it can be used with a wide variety of POSIX based utilities through a library called Ajax (POSIX, if you’re not aware, is the name of the ISO standard for the behaviour of Unix-like operating systems).

The Amoeba site hasn’t been updated in a while, so if you happen to have a few old 486 machines lying around it might be fun to play with. It’s another one on my to-look-at list, so if I make any progress I’ll let you all know…

Given Linus Torvalds‘ recent quote that the OpenBSD team’s approach to security made them look like a gang of masturbating monkeys, I thought it might be a good time to start up an idea I’ve been considering for a while: operating system of the week.

BSD, in case you don’t already know, was developed at the University of California, Berkeley from 1977 until the mid-90s. It started on the classic DEC PDP-11 as an add on to Sixth Edition Unix, and in its second release added my favourite text editor, good old vi (well, vim’s actually the one I use, but that’s a side issue.)

In June 1994 came the first truly “open” version of BSD: 4.4 BSD-Lite, which contained no code from AT&T, and therefore wasn’t “encumbered” (which was the name of the version that did include AT&T code). A final release - 4.4BSDLite-2 - was made in 1995, and since then, development has continued with various distributions diverging from it since then: DragonflyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD being the most common today (I’ll cover them at a later date).

You can still get hold of 4.4BSD-Lite release 2, however, despite its long being discontinued as a maintained system (well, by the University of California, anyway). So, for your delectation and delight, here is the download link (to Japan):

• ftp://ftp.sra.co.jp/pub/os/4.4BSD-Lite/

I’ve downloaded it myself, and might well be covering running it in a virtual machine at some later date.

For the mean time, enjoy this little look back at the way things used to be.