This interesting whitepaper from Microsoft Research considers future directions for operating systems in the new millenium, and proposes a distributed operating system that offers “seamless distribution, worldwide calability, fault-tolerance, self-tuning, self-configuration, security, and resource controls.” Quoting from the abstract . . .

“We believe it is time to reexamine the operating system's role in computing. Operating systems exist to create an environment in which compelling applications come to life. They do that by providing abstractions built on the services provided by hardware. We argue that advances in hardware and networking technology enable a new kind of operating system to support tomorrow's applications. Such an operating system would raise the level of abstraction for developers and users, so that individual computers, file systems, and networks become unimportant to most computations in the same way that processor registers, disk sectors, and physical pages are today.”

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