Yeah this OS would suck as soon as the 00s hit with the global Internet. This OS seems completely incompatible with how the world actually works and would probably collapse under its own design by the year 2010. A file is an arbitrary string of bytes. Removing the ability for the user to handle them like this is so obtuse. The reason why we can poke modern OSes the way we can is to prevent requiring a man-year of work every time we need a major new feature.
The idea was that every layer, from silicon to user interface, would be designed together, with no compatibility debt to existing platforms.
…which makes compatability debt between it and literally everything else.
A file is an arbitrary string of bytes. Removing the ability for the user to handle them like this is so obtuse.
Per the article:
According to the BTRON3 specification, the first two halfwords of an application ID are the data type it applies to, and only the third distinguishes rival handlers for the same type. When a document contained writing, a table, and a figure, opening those parts made the system launch each one’s registered handler to draw its own content inside the parent document’s window. If no handler exists, or the handler fails to draw, the system strikes a diagonal line through the region where the content should have been.
That’s a window manager with application/file associations, with the ‘window’ that the application draws to being embedded within a hypertext document. So, you’d be able to attach arbitrary hypertext to a file and when you open it the window manager presents that information along with the application window. That’s not any less flexible or more limited than any other desktop OS.
EDIT: now, it sounds like you could embed multiple ‘windows’ within the same document, and maybe do something with transclusion, but I haven’t read enough about how BTRON worked to say much about that. Still, that doesn’t fundamentally change what I wrote above.
Yeah this OS would suck as soon as the 00s hit with the global Internet. This OS seems completely incompatible with how the world actually works and would probably collapse under its own design by the year 2010. A file is an arbitrary string of bytes. Removing the ability for the user to handle them like this is so obtuse. The reason why we can poke modern OSes the way we can is to prevent requiring a man-year of work every time we need a major new feature.
…which makes compatability debt between it and literally everything else.
Per the article:
That’s a window manager with application/file associations, with the ‘window’ that the application draws to being embedded within a hypertext document. So, you’d be able to attach arbitrary hypertext to a file and when you open it the window manager presents that information along with the application window. That’s not any less flexible or more limited than any other desktop OS.
EDIT: now, it sounds like you could embed multiple ‘windows’ within the same document, and maybe do something with transclusion, but I haven’t read enough about how BTRON worked to say much about that. Still, that doesn’t fundamentally change what I wrote above.
That sounds like hell. The .DS_store problem but 100 times worse.
Every single mainstream operating system has metadata and index stores associated with its files and applications.
Linux has locatedb and .desktop files, and many other files that determine how content is presented to you in a desktop environment.
Windows has NTFS alternate data streams, the registry, multiple appdata folders, and a bunch of other kludges.