Narue

>the type of project that would be feasible for a small group of (or
>individual) experienced programmers
This is strictly conjecture.

>From this, he does not appear to be talking about just building an OS, he
>appears to be talking about building an OS with a GUI, using no libraries or
>prewritten code whatsoever
It seems you've caught up. Congratulations.

>with a team of relatively inexperienced developers
This is the assumption we've made thusfar, yes.

>The difference in scale between that goal, and the goals of Tovalds and
>Tanenbaum, should be immediately obvious.
Once again taking us to the (as yet, unanswered) question of why you bothered to bring up Tanenbaum and Minix in the first place.

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Arevos

What are you talking about? Both Minix 1.0 and Linux 0.0.1 were constructed by individual programmers. Surely this adequately demonstrates that that type of project is a feasible task for a small number of sufficiently experienced programmers? I don't understand why you think this is conjecture.

It was a reply to a point you raised, namely:
I don't know about you, but when the subject of individuals constructing operating systems comes up, one of the first people who comes to my mind is Dr. Tanenbaum. My point, which may have been too subtle, was to emphasise that even the most basic of operating systems requires considerable experience to construct.

I'm also somewhat skeptical about your claim. I know of no operating system developed by an individual in widespread usage. Sky.OS comes close (but no cigar). I'd also hesitate to call it decent, according to your definition of "Users don't constantly curse the author" - even MS Windows has some trouble with that definition!

Narue

>What are you talking about?
Perhaps I read your statement incorrectly. My impression was that you were implying a small project like Minix is suited to one person or a small inexperienced team while anything more sophisticated is not.

>even the most basic of operating systems requires considerable experience to construct
This is true, and I don't recall stating otherwise.

>I know of no operating system developed by an individual in widespread usage.
It seems your logic is flawed if you're using your own limited experience to counter my claim that it's possible for a single knowledgeable programmer to write a decent graphical OS. It's also rather dangerous because while you would have to go to impossibly great lengths to prove me wrong, I would only need to find a single instance to prove my own case.

>"Users don't constantly curse the author" - even MS Windows has some trouble with that definition!
Realistically speaking, this is not true. Yes, people curse Microsoft when Windows does something they don't like, but not so constantly as people would have you believe. I find Windows XP to be a decent operating system, much like I find most Linux distributions to be decent, and Unix versions to be decent.

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Wizard1988

You should also check out

http://www.menuetos.net/

It seems really interestig

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JG-Webdesign

King

Thrasivoulas, what is your current skill level, because making an OS is very difficult. Maybe you and your friends should start with something a bit simpler if you’re not that experienced.

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DaWei

Writing an OS requires specialized knowledge. On the other hand, so does making a shoe. Particularly if you begin with a live cow. Working up to it by acquiring some prerequisites is probably wise. One is less likely to develop an extreme distaste that results in abandonment of the project and all related things.

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Arevos

In theory you're correct; in practise things tend to be somewhat different, as the burden of proof often lies with those who make unlikely or unusual claims.

For instance, if I claimed that there existed an elephant in Africa with a naturally green and white striped skin, then theoretically one would have to examine every elephant in Africa to prove me wrong. However, in practise, my claim is so unusual that the burden of proof lies on me; my fellow pachyderm researchers have seen many elephants, and none of them have had the hue which I have claim to have seen, so the circumstancial statistical evidence is against me.

Like the green and white striped elephant, I know of no graphical operating system developed by an individual that is in a stable and usable state for day to day usage. I view it unlikely that one exists, as it seems precisely the sort of technical oddity that anyone with a passing interest in operating systems would soon hear word about. I view it as unusual, because other operating systems of such capability have taken many people many years to construct.

Thus, I place the ball in your court. Find an example of such an operating system or conceed the argument.

Narue

>Find an example of such an operating system or conceed the argument.
There is no argument. You jumped in and started attacking me on a minor point for no obvious reason and completely (in my opinion) failed to defend your case. My proof is in my experience. Though I fully expect you to deny that as proof despite using your own experience as an example of your case. When I first started programming professionally, the office was using a custom made OS (graphical) written by one person. It was my job to clean up the system and make it stable, so technically a stable, largely decent OS was written by two people, which refutes your claim, though I can't prove it. However, since this seems to be a "your word against mine" pissing match for you, I guess that's not much of an issue.

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lectricpharaoh

Yes, this is true enough- anyone who's taken basic logic and knows the difference between existential and universal quantifiers knows this- but let's suppose for a moment that there indeed exists such an elephant, and you could produce it. As soon as you did so, others would need to accept the truth of your assertion (notwithstanding counter-assertions such as the elephant's color not being natural, or whatever).
I don't recall Thrasivoulas saying the OS needed to be comprehensive, nor do I recall Narue saying that a single-author OS was necessarily likewise comprehensive. I'm reminded of when I was much younger, and I had an Atari ST. The OS on the ST was TOS (acronym for 'The Operating System'; even less imaginative than 'DOS'), and it had a graphical shell called GEM ('Graphics Environment Manager', which I believe has been available on other platforms as well). Anyways, this model was quite similar to the DOS/Win3.x model, where the GUI was not an operating system proper, but more of an operating environment. Still, there was an underlying OS, and while TOS (at least the earlier versions) lacked any kind of support for networking, multitasking, and other things considered standard in a modern operating system, this didn't make it any less worthy of the definition.

Likewise, your statement that the OS in question needs to be suitable for 'day-to-day usage' seems to imply it must offer a comparable feature set to current mainstream OSs, which I don't think is a fair qualification.

I don't get why you two are arguing over nit-picky details, when you both seem to agree on the salient point that it is entirely possible for a person with the requisite skill set to create such an OS:

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Arevos

We seem to be having two different discussions. I was not attacking you; I was defending my original post. You were the one who originally replied to my post, not the other way around.

I'm starting to suspect we are not discussing the same thing, and our disagreement revolves around that. In this, I'm probably at fault; the wording of the original post set me thinking along a very narrow path.

Probably tunnel vision on my part, I'm afraid. It's been a somewhat exhausting week, I have a flight to catch in a few days, and my hard drive is now on the road to inevitable death, caused by a rather badly constructed desk. The irritating part, aside from having to find a home for 160GB of data, is that I could have avoided the hassle by placing my case on the floor instead of risking disk integrity on an unstable surface.