How prescient. After talking about Amoeba, Orca and other fluffy Vrije Universitat stuff, PC World just interviewed Andrew Tanenbaum. And MINIX was next on my left for OS of the week, too

Orca, the programming language almost synonymous with the operating system Amoeba (other than Python, which also started on Amoeba), is designed for use on distributed systems. This essentially means that several computers come together – similar to Seti@Home – to create a single, giant supercomputer.
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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…