New World OS is a project I started several years ago to re-think the whole computer operating system paradigm.
I started working in the computer industry in 1973, when microprocessors were first coming onto the scene. During that time there have been amazing changes in the speed and size of computers. However, they still work in fundamentally the same way they did 34 years ago when I first started working with them. It is true that there weren't any Graphical User Interfaces in those days, down underneath the GUI, modern operating systems are still more or less the same as operating systems in 1973.
I have always been interested in operating systems and making them easier to use. In 1979 a friend and I started Omicron Computers to develop a new PC. It was based upon the National Semiconductor 32000 series microprocessor and I started developing an operating system for it. When Apple introduced the Macintosh, we decided that there wasn't much chance of our competing it and dropped the project.
Unfortunately, I could not afford a Macintosh so I had to use IBM clones. In 1993 I got a new 486 PC to develop an application for a small business. I fought with Windows 3.1 for over a month and disovered that I spent more time rebooting it than I did using it. I finally decided that at the rate I was going, developing the program on Windows would take several decades and reverted back to MS-DOS.
By 1995 that 486 PC was outdated and I bought a new one, with the just released Windows 95. Windows 95 was an absolute nightmare. There wasn't one single thing that I tried to do that worked correctly. I spent hundreds of hours just screwing around trying to get it to do the simple tasks I needed to do on it.
For example, bought a new fancy audio card for it. When I installed it and the software that came with it, the machine stopped booting up altogether. I messed around with it off and on for several weeks trying to get it working again, with no luck. Finally, one weekend, I had a task that I absolutely had to accomplish and I was forced to get it going again. I literally spent every waking minute from Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon working on that piece of junk and still couldn't get it working. I was so frustrated that I actually considered throwing the $1,700 boat anchor off the balcony. To keep myself from doing that, I had to leave the apartment and go for a bike ride to calm down.
The following Monday I went out and bought a used Macintosh. It was an old 68K based Mac, and significantly slower than the Pentium I had wasted so much money on. But it had one significant advantage over the Pentium, it WORKED! Whenever I installed software, it worked the first time. When I added hardware it worked the first time.
The only real problem I ever remember having with those old Macintoshes was with the printer. If I ever forgot to turn the printer on before printing something, it got into some funky state and the machine slowed to a crawl and I had to fool around removing the print job and it usually took several reboots to get it back to normal. It was frustrating, but since it was very rare I could put up with it. It was far and away better than Windows which was frustrating every single time I booted it up.
I was upset, however, that I had this expensive paper weight sitting there unused. I had spent so much money on this machine and it was pretty much useless. The Internet was starting to take off and it occurred to me that I could perhaps make use of that box for surfing the web (I was so naive). I went out and purchased a copy of Netscape (this was before it was free). I tried to install it and during installation Windows 95 wanted the install disk. It was late at night, I was tired and didn't feel like trying to find the stupid Windows 95 CD. So I decided I would just continue this farce the next day. Ha ha ha ha! As you may have guessed that was a big mistake. It would not continue the next day. In fact it took me weeks to get the machine to boot up again.
Even after I got Windows 95 working again, it was still a horrible experince. It would rarely go for more than an hour before crashing or locking up. Sometimes it would only run for 2 or 3 minutes before hanging. That box was more or less still useless.
I gave OS/2 Warp a go on my machine. I had heard many good things about it from several people. It was stable, worked well and I kind of liked it. But at the time I did not have a compiler for it and so I couldn't develop software on it. I could not afford to purchase the commercial compiler for it. I tried, unsuccessfully, to get the GCC compiler to work. I got frustrated with that and trying to find other applications that would work on it.
Things were looking bad in the computing world around 1996-1997. Windows sucked. It was looking like Apple was faltering and Microsoft was going to be the only choice. That was very depressing to me. It certainly appeared that bad was going to triumph over good. I was discouraged about the future of computing.
Then around that time I first heard of BeOS. It suddenly seemed like there was hope again. BeOS was cool, fast, and slick. BeOS got me excited about computing again. It was different and it was fresh. Computing was was fun and exciting again. It gave me hope. I think one of the most significant things about BeOS is that they broke away from the past. They did things differently than the way they had always been done before. BeOS was one of my main inspirations for doing New World OS.
It was a sad, sad day for me when Be, Inc. closed it's doors. There is no doubt in my mind that Microsoft killed BeOS. I am not going to go into that whole thing here. But I don't believe that anybody is going to do a one BILLION dollar settlement with somebody if there isn't any evidence and you are completely innocent! It is yet another reason to dislike Microsoft. It was around this time that Microsoft was starting to promote Windows 98: "You remember that expensive OS we sold you a few years ago? Well, unfortunately (for you) it turned out that there were 5,000 bugs in it. You should really give us another hundred or two and get this new shiny OS that doesn't have those 5,000 bugs!"
What I said to that was: "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me". I decided that I was not going to keep supporting Billy G. & Co. in their quest to make the buggiest bloatware ever created. I bought a copy of Red Hat Linux and decided to install it on my paperweight.
Installing GNU/Linux in those days was a little tricky. You either had to know what you were doing or be willing to fool around a bit with it. But what I discovered about GNU/Linux is that once you get it working, it is solid as a rock. That same machine that crashed or locked up every few minutes with Windows, would run for days or weeks with GNU/Linux. I have had GNU/Linux machines stay up for 6 months or more without a reboot. I have even had a server stay up without a reboot for more than 800 days (more than 2 years)!
I have also dabbled in the BSDs (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, PC-BSD). I think these operating systems are very good as well. I have been using OpenBSD as a firewall for many years now with great success. I have even used it as a desktop off and on. FreeBSD is also a very good operating system. I ported the aforementioned project I originally wrote for MS-DOS to FreeBSD and it runs very well.
Since I kicked Windows to the curb in 1998, I have mainly used GNU/Linux with some BSDs thrown in here and there. I still use one old Macintosh with the original MacOS. I have another PowerMac with MacOS X. I have used many different versions of GNU/Linux:
And just for the record, Windows might be better than it was in 1998, but it still sucks! Like a friend of mine used to say: "You just can't make chicken salad out of chiken sh*t".
So everything is cool now, right! I still have my Macintoshes, GNU/Linux, and BSD machines, what more did I want?
It started in March of 2001, we were moving back to Utah from Virginia. I was trying to change something on my Cell phone. I don't even remember now what I was trying to do, but whatever it was it was not obvious to me. We were in a motel with all our stuff packed in a large truck, so there was no way I was ever going to find the manual. The manual was pretty useless, because I could never seem to find the answer in it anyway. How could one need a 100 page manual to operate a telephone?
That got me to thinking (always a dangerous thing); why are all these devices so difficult to use? I started thinking about computers and why it seems like things that should be so simple always end up being more difficult. If I wanted to find out some information, I had to dig around all over the place to find it. Let's say I had some file or document I created a couple of years ago and I need to have it now. Where is it? I've had dozens of computers that I've used over the years. Combine that with a terrible memory and I've spent hours and hours trying to find that document.
So I started the EasyOS project on Sourceforge.net in 2001. Please note that after I started New World OS, I let someone else take over the EasyOS moniker on Sourceforge. Kind of ironic that it would be something to make Windows easy to use.
Some of the GNU/Linux distributions I have used, install far too much software that I never use. There is one that took 5 CDs to install. While it didn't install everything on the 5 CDs, it did install way too many packages. There was an option to do a minimal install but then you had to spend hours adding things that you had to have and sometimes I had trouble getting it to work correctly. So the minimal install didn't really work very well. For EasyOS I wanted it to have a minimal, but usable install, and then automatically install applications as needed.
My original plan for EasyOS had been to incorporate pieces of GNU, Linux, and BSD into something easier to use. But as I worked on EasyOS, GNU/Linux improved and became easier to install and use. Many of the things I wanted to do in EasyOS were already making their way into GNU/Linux.
And the more I thought about EasyOS, the more radical my ideas became. I started thinking about how little computer operating systems had changed in the 30+ years I had been working in the industry. BeOS had departed from tradition is some ways and I thought about that a lot. I thought; what if we wiped the slate completely clean and started over, taking into consideration all of the things that have been learned in the past 30 years?
Finally, I decided that I wanted to go farther than I had planned with EasyOS. I wanted to try new and more radical ideas. I wanted to throw out everything about existing operating systems and re-think the whole thing. I decided that EasyOS did not speak to what I wanted to do with this new operating system. I wanted something that said "new and different". One of my favorite songs by Ministry is "NWO" (New World Order) and I really liked that phrase, I decided to call it NWOS or New World OS.
To be continued...
Article I wrote for OSNews in 2004 about NewOS
Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter
Lost Alternative - Transfer your Records and Tapes to CD