Why I Love Operating Systems

I feel priveleged to have grown up in the post-multics (the first architected OS) pre-Windows (the first commodity OS) period and through the evolution from UNIX (the first portable operating sytstem) to Linux (the Open Source systema galactica). We have lived through periods of of unrestrained exploration and seen the evolution of serious craftsmanship. We got to be part of operating systems back when it was still possible for a single person to understand one.

Every once in a while, some-body asks me why I spent 50 years building operating systems:

• they are (in terms of the number of moving parts) among the most complex things we have ever created.
• they are among the most perfect things ever built by human hands: how little room there is for error, and how long they are expected to serve.
• despite the rigorous pragmatic, performance, and robustness requirements they must satsify, the best of them are distinguished by philosophical and aesthetic beauty
• they are tremendous tests of Zen ... requiring the practicianer to be able to put himself perfectly at-one with intricate, complex emergent phenomenon in a completely alien universe.
• they completely ignore the line between "flights of fantasy" and "industrial machinery". We do, in fact, get to re-write the laws of physics, and make possible things that were not previously even imaginable.

In some sense, I think that the rise of operating systems has been like a beautiful sunset ... an ephemeral thing that could only be savored by the few people who happened to be in the right place at that moment ... but now passed and not to be repeated. There will certainly be other revolutions and rennaissances ... but I feel uniquely priveleged to have had such a great seat for this one.

... but long ago I learned that there wasn't much point in trying to explain this. Most people conclude that this proves what-ever they've always suspected about techno-weenies, and the few charitable souls who remain merely think "I'm sure all that gibberish means something to him".