On 17-Oct-2007, at 03:02, Jonathan Stowe wrote:
Strangely RiscOS isn't completely dead just not very well
http://www.iyonix.com/
There are lots of zombie operating systems. There's even people
who'll sell you what they claim is BeOS and AmigaOS running on new
hardware. There's precisely four OS APIs that it's worth writing new
software for:
* UNIX
* Windows
* VMS
* Whatever IBM is calling the descendants of OS/360 this week.
Of the four, UNIX gets you OSX, Linux, Windows (through compatibility
layers or Microsoft's own hosted port of BSD), and VMS (through
compatibility layers), and IBM mainframes (Linux on VM).
For GUIs, things are more muddled. The choices as I see them are:
* Win32
* .NET
* Qt
* Gtk
* OpenStep/Cocoa common subset
* Tk plus your scripting language of choice
Have I missed any? I guess Motif's descendants are still alive. And
all of them are so hateful they make me nostalgic for the days when I
was only writing code to be portable between MS-DOS, VMS, AmigaDOS,
Xenix, RSX-11, ISIS, AIX (back before they quit trying to turn it
into part of SAA), and Exec-1100. And the first three are trying to
be OS APIs as well (yes, Windows has at least three completely
separate OS APIs to choose from), which makes things even more
hateful. And I had hopes, back in the early '80s, that open systems
would make this kind of thing a quaint memory of the mainframe era.
Sigh.
