
Web OS? Not an OS - naish
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/06/03/Not-an-OS
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mxh
Bray's conclusion, as I understand it, is that there is no "Web OS". I think
he's wrong, because he's not looking in the right place.

"OS"es started as collections of low-level utility code that helped apps run
on particular pieces of hardware. Code that loaded programs, provided low-
level I/O services (Bray bags on the primitiveness of OS services, but they're
much better than talking to h/w devices directly), helped with memory
management, and so on.

The web doesn't really have hardware, but it definitely needs abstractions and
utility code. So I'd say the "Web OS" is something like Mochikit, or Dojo, or
Prototype, or any other big honking JS framework that abstracts away client-
side nastiness.

At any rate, that seems the part of the "Web" that's most analogous to a
traditional OS, and something usefully modeled as such.

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ojbyrne
"low-level utility code that helped apps run on particular pieces of
hardware."

s/low-level utility code/APIs/

s/particular pieces of hardware/individual websites/

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zach
The concept of a "web OS" makes only slightly more sense than that of an
"email OS."

