I've created a forum to discuss Internet Operating Systems, and I would like a few people to contribute.

The objective of the forum is to discuss diverse approaches and aspects of designing an IOS, from the hard-nosed programming, through user interface considerations, to the potential applications and benefits to communities.

We would like to launch an open standard/source project from these discussions.

Our own vision for an IOS (and we would like to support other visions, and conflicting approaches too in this forum), is for an open standard so that application writers can choose from a range of existing internet technologies.

Eg DHTML, Java, Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime etc. We don't want to lock it down to just one technology - say Java.

The prototype is written in Flash, and can be found at:-

http://i2genius.com/ecard.html

You can find the forum at:- http://i2genius.com/forum

(This has several categories, but it is only the Internet Operating System category that we are launching at this time).

Please, please contribute to this forum (especially if you want flash to still have some relevance in the IOS of the future ;)


(What is wrong with THIS forum btw. IE5.1 froze up when I tried to get in, and with Netscape 7.01, I had to make my own newlines in this editor - otherwise I would have just got one long line of text without breaks).http://i2genius.com/ecard.html

I am not the most savvy, but I thought operating systems were different animals than internet browsers. I thought that you had to install, for example, IE5 with the drivers for WINNT or W2K.

btw, why are you on IE5.1? Is it just so you can test code against old internet apps?

Hi Pazzo,

Laziness! Just too lazy to install anything newer. Besides, Micro$oft are going to stop supporting IE on the mac - so why bother.
Although the issue may be - why are Macromedia too lazy to bother with backward compatibility?

Anyway, Internet Operating Systems....

The Internet Computer / Thin Client philosophy is that you could make an extremely inexpensive consumer device which loads and runs programs on the Internet.
The users files are also stored on the internet. (Although some IOS people prefer a peer-to-peer architecture - I prefer centralised myself).

So this has the advantages that the hardware is cheaper, pay-on-demand software becomes easy to implement, as does distribution and updates, and the whole thing
can be made much easier to use than stand-alone workstations, because the user doesn't have to bother with maintaining what happens at the server end.

btw - I always get flamed when I talk about this stuff. Most people are so entrenched in their stand-along Micro$oft world that the idea of change is very scary for them.
However, there are lots of indications that the industry is moving into this direction, including the announcements made by Oracle this week.

Personally, I'd like the IOS of the future not to be owned by Oracle, Sun, Micro$oft, etc. But it will be open and free and owned by it's users - like Linux, but not the underdog.

So if you wanted to manufacture such devices, aimed at the high street, you might take something like Linux (because it has no license fees), maybe chop off all the bits you don't
need in this context, and integrate the O/S closely with a web browser, and also the IOS client 'shell'. (which might be the web browser anyway, or the JVM maybe, or something else)

By the way, this is just the sort of discussion that should be happening on MY forum :)