Why Some Dead OSes Still matter

By Andrey Mirtchovski and Latchesar IonkoV of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

With its currently unchallenged ubiquity, the Linux operating system has become the de facto standard research OS in academia. The consequent waning of general systems research has been well documented [2], with the number of alternative operating systems in existence that significantly depart from the UNIX model and that are actively in development rapidly approaching zero. In this article we will discuss one such alternative operating system that has refused to disappear completely, and we will attempt to evaluate the features of that OS that make it suitable as a vehicle in our research projects and as a research environment.

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