Platforms and OS and apps...oh, my!I

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/08/google.chrome.challenges/index.html

The link above is about Google's proposed "Chrome" operating system; probably the first major new offering for OS's since Linux and it's various iterations. I've had exposure to a fair few OS's, from my early TI-99-4a through PC-DOS and AmigaDOS and all the stripes of Windows and Mac OS7, then Mac OSX; and I worked with some bigger machine OS's but never at the programmer level or anything. Still, I think I understand a bit about how all this stuff works, and how OS's and architecture work together to allow softwares to launch and run and do all the cool stuff we want to do.

I think we're looking at some paradigm-shift sort of dynamics here; I can see some value to a stripped-down OS designed to hook-up to and run apps that are never machine-resident; Windows already does that with the OS that's used on hand-held RF scanguns and such. In my opinion, it was a bit of overkill, but the scangun manufacturer obviously found it financially expeditious to license and use that OS over rolling up their own OS and then having to render it compatible with all the different softwares that it might be required to interface with. There are so many new uses for personal computing power, it's probably time to approach the situation from a whole new perspective. Still, that's a daunting prospective, and the folks who get it right are going to own the turf for a little while.

For myself, I find it all very interesting and exciting; I grin like a ninny at the chance to fiddle around with the new things coming out, especially as all these other platforms of mine continue to work and do what I want them to do. And I'm still blithely skating along, well behind the cutting edge. I really do need to get that Linux machine built....