So, for my article, I have decided to focus on an Operating System born in the early days of consumer-available ‘ WIMP‘ interfaces, on extremely restrictive hardware. What we’ve come to accept as the standard way of interacting with a computer was cemented in the early days by the extremely knowledgeable and technical system engineers of the day, through a process of creating: User involvement in design is almost an after-thought.
Whilst actual human guinea-pig testing is done on new interfaces, it still does not make up the bulk of the design process. The joy of alternative operating systems, is the variety of Computer ? Human interface models available.Įven now, the modern operating system is designed from the perspective of the engineer. With hardware already a commodity, the way we interact with our computers is taken as a standard, and a given best-practice of design. Note: After a small break, here is another one of the articles for the Alternative OS contest.Īs we take time to look at the grand variety of operating systems available, it shows us that there is no one right way to ‘do it’. It was written using immense knowledge of the hardware and the tricks one could use to maximise speed.
It wasn’t an OS written to run on a generic x86 chip on a moving hardware platform. GEOS managed to offer nearly all the functionality of the original Mac in a 1 MHz computer with 64 Kilobytes of RAM.
