Operating System Relevancy and your $2,500 Smart Client

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OS Maturity

Ryan - I've been thinking about this one a bit, along with the
history of how operating systems have developed.

A lot of younger people probably don't remember but 'back in
the day', before GUIs, you ran one program that took over your
computer. Your OS didn't really do much - managed the disk /
tape, loading programs into memory and some display libraries.

Early GUIs were a revelation - you didn't need to quit one
program to use another (although you quickly ran out of
memory). You could cut text from one program and paste it into
another. Of course you couldn't actually run two programs at the
same time, but it looked like it.

Eventually we got to today's true multi-tasking systems.

Then along came the web. Not really designed as a system for
writing apps (hence having the separation between HTTP, which
was, and HTML). But web applications were financially
compelling - enough to offset the pain of writing them. So we
were cast back to the 1970s dumb terminal model.

I think current RIAs advance us to the 80s - you're still at the
level of opening up individual applications that don't talk to each
other. Solving this one is going to be interesting (there are good
security reasons we disable cross-site cookies and data, and an
RIA clipboard could be abused in that way).

Of course this is probably 'good enough' for most people. Most
people really do use one app, then another, and probably aren't
bothered their RIA doesn't support scripting from their OS.

Posted by: JulesLt   Posted on: 06/17/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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