When I was in college, I gave a lot of thought about what I liked about MS DOS, and what annoyed me about it. The biggest annoyance? That while I logged into my college's Novell network to access my personal files, email, and so forth, any changes I made to that computer were limited to that computer only, and if anyone else came afterward and changed the settings, when I returned to that computer, it would be different! That, and it annoyed me that when my family had a single computer between all of us, we were in constant "tussles" with our settings there, too, and we all had access to each other's personal files. Thus, I wanted an MS DOS that was truly multi-user.
And what did I want from Windows, that would be nice in a Command Line setting? I'd like to be able to run multiple programs at the same time, and switch between them as needed! It annoyed me that I had to either choose to operate under the constraints of a graphical environment, or I had to choose to run one program at a time, closing one so I could open another.
I was determined to fix all of this! At the time, I was particularly in love with Forth (well, technically, I still am) and was going to expand it into an object-oriented dialect I'd call "Opium" (because I figured it would be addictive), and this would be my basis for this system. I realized early on that I'd need to have applications for my OS to be worthwhile, so I imagined writing to WordPerfect asking them to port their program to my OS -- and I suspected early on that WordPerfect almost certainly wouldn't do that for an OS with one user (namely me!).
What became of this? It kindof stalled out when college homework and activities took precedence ... nonetheless, when I finally got around to understanding this odd new OS called "Linux" -- I found the OS I was wanting to design! It had fantastic user management, and if I wanted to run a dozen apps at a time, between "Ctl-Z" to suspend, "fg" to bring to the foreground, "bg" to have it run in the background, and "kill" to eliminate rogue processes, I could do these things from the Command Line!
The name "OpSys i" was a mix of imitating the naming style for "Op Amps" and an admiration of imaginary numbers. Sadly, "OpSys i" will necessarily remain purely imaginary ... unless one considers Linux the embodiment of my imagination!
Then again, maybe I could tame my ambitions some day ... and write my own tiny operating system for microcontrollers ... if I do, perhaps I should call it "OpSys i".
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