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Talk:Object-oriented operating system

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Dpbsmith (talk | contribs) at 15:39, 22 February 2004. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Isn't it WAY to steep to consider Win9x systems front-ends for DOS? If you had said so for Win3.x, I would have agreed, but this sounds like a little too much to me...

Indeed. I fixed it. The role of DOS in Win 9x is fairly obscure, but can be rougly summarised as follows:
  • There are two OSes, real mode and protected mode. The computer starts in one and then switches to the other. The real mode OS could loosely be called MS-DOS.
  • Windows APIs often call DOS APIs which in turn call Windows implementations. This is for backwards compatibility. It allows interrupt hooks.
  • From 95 to 98 to Me, features have been progressively ported from Windows 3.x era 16-bit code to 32-bit code. Backwards compatibility has been maintained.

-- Tim Starling 12:00 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Surely, the concept of an object-oriented OS has nothing to do with the concept of GUI widgets? I have always believed that an OS is object oriented in API design, rather than in GUI implementation.

As far as I can tell, most OSes have OO-like features in their APIs, for instance, in UNIX, everything is a file/stream; in Windows, only handles are passed around; in Darwin, the driver API is implemented in C++; in microkernels, messages are passed between processes (like invoking methods of objects); and naturally, widget-oriented GUIs are object-oriented. (Curiously, X11 isn't -- the only type of graphical object is a window, and apparently, windows don't nest)


It's much more complicated that than. And the article, which I dislike, does have a reference to common language in wide use in the early 1990s.

First of all, WIMP is a legitimate acronym, and was in common use in the late eighties. It was largely displaced by GUI. People needed a name for all of these strange new things like Digital Research's GEM and Apple's LISA and VisiCorp's VisiOn. IMHO both WIMP and GUI were deliberately conceived to be slightly derogatory; a lot of people at the time preferred command lines and didn't think this silly icon stuff would ever really take off. (In the MUMPS world the was once widespread use of the term "CHUI," pronounced "chewy," for character-based-UI... )Second... I personally hate the locutions and never understood what they were supposed to mean and thought they were marketing-speak... but there was a popular use of the word "object-oriented" to mean something... undefined. In the early nineties, it was widely asserted that OS/2's um... Presentation Manager was a "true" object-oriented operating system, in comparison to Windows (2.11, 3.0, 3.1), which were not. At the same time, there were various efforts--HP's NewWave, Wang's ClearView, etc.--to put new graphics shells on top of Windows, graphics shells which were always described as being "object-oriented." In other words, at the time, many people would have said that OS/2 was object-oriented, Windows 3.xx was not, and Windows 95 was claimed to be but wasn't. Similarly, draw-style programs such as MacDraw were widely described as "object oriented" and contrasted with paint-style programs which were said not to be. There's some kind of possible article there trying to explain what these terms apparently meant to people back then. Dpbsmith 13:13, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I'm going to make notes here as a run across stuff that's relevant to what an "object-oriented OS" is supposed to be. This is difficult for me because I think it's all garbage and marketing, but, nevertheless...

http://www.os2hq.com/os2faq.htm says:

  • The OS/2 GUI, Workplace Shell, is a true object-oriented interface, meaning that the screen elements are consistent and fully take advantage of system capabilities. The Windows interfaces are not object-oriented in the strictest sense, because they fail to adequately track the files to which they are pointing, as well as other inconsistencies.

The Windows 3.x interface was, of course, a mess. There were icons that seemed to be files, but if you deleted the icon you weren't deleting the file.

I think that what you have is a second-order definition. An object-oriented application means an application that has the characteristics of applications that are coded using object-oriented programming. Possibly this arose in the Xerox PARC days? Maybe an object-oriented application is one in which the things which appear to be physical objects on the screen are, in fact, objects within the programming system?

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