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Visopsys: OS maintained by a single developer since 1997

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3 months agoby kome

I took an OS in college in 2006 and the big project that my prof required us to do was to make modification of visopsys. The software was primitive at that time but still had UI interface.

I emailed the author to ask some questions in my project. The author had connection with my prof and informed my prof about this. My prof told me that I was not allowed to ask the author regarding this project. So I had to figured out on my own.

It was fun to play around with and learnt how things work at deep OS level. It was a good memory for me :)

And you guys notice anything about my username? :)

3 months agoby visopsys

This is very very cool, and unlike a lot of other "hobby" OSes actually looks usable as a daily driver if your needs are basic (kids, elderly, older/cheaper hardware, etc).

While for nerds computers have become these monstrously powerful things that can do everything under the sun, there's definitely still plenty of people who just want a computer to write down notes, keep a calendar, use the calculator... eg the things home computers were originally made to do.

3 months agoby sen

Surprisingly only one small previous thread:

Visopsys - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18147201 - Oct 2018 (6 comments)

3 months agoby dang

Interesting. Never heard of this system before. It's apparently a monolithic kernel, developed almost exclusively by originally Canadian programmer Andy McLaughlin since 1997. The system has a graphical user interface, preemptive multitasking, and virtual memory. It is implemented in C and IA-32 assembly language. Here is a 2012 interview with the author: https://www.pingdom.com/blog/visopsys-operating-system/.

3 months agoby Rochus

it took me a while to find. here is the source code: https://sourceforge.net/projects/visopsys/files/visopsys-0.9...

3 months agoby khimaros

Ahh this OS is small enough that a university professor used it as the basis for his class assignments: write a device driver for it, or a pipe implementation, if I recall correctly. I thought it was pretty genius at the time, and it was certainly quite a challenge for the students too.

3 months agoby zxcvgm

Amazing! I find it extremely fascinating that somebody is able to create entire operating system. Not a easy task!

3 months agoby sorbusherra

Michael MJD did a video on this recently :)

https://youtu.be/5MZljgXW2WA

3 months agoby jonhermansen

The most impressive thing is being on 0.9 after nearly 30 years

3 months agoby sam0x17

Very impressed by the screenshots in the website. This is no small feat.

3 months agoby ciroduran

Speaking of these, does anyone recall the AtheneOS distribution/OS. There’s an archive.org copy of the desktop environment version of it, but I recall there was a really fast version with only 2D graphics and it was a full distribution.

Can anyone validate whether this is real? I tried contacting the guy who wrote it but the Companies House address for his company (Rocklyte) bounced the letter.

3 months agoby arjie

It mentions preemptive multitasking as one of its features. Are there any operating systems that still use cooperative multitasking?

3 months agoby dustractor

Took me a while to realize it's not a linux distro. Incredible!

3 months agoby _false

It’s amazing how one person kept this project alive since 1997, that’s real passion and love for coding!

3 months agoby marenVoyant88

GitHub mirror:

https://github.com/bbarker/Visopsys

(Protected-Mode (PM) switch/handoff code in:

https://github.com/bbarker/Visopsys/blob/master/src/osloader...)

3 months agoby peter_d_sherman