The operating system (as in: a kernel) provides applications with an abstraction of the computer that allows applications to co-exist.
The "operating system" (as in: a desktop environment) provides users with a unified approach to design, interaction and cooperation.
We don't write applications to run on bare metal any more (or rather, very, very few people do), because that's neither desirable or cost-effective.
That "subroutine called a disk driver" is just ridiculous. Any modern computing device has more than one process that needs to write to the disk; the machinery that allows them all to do that without stepping on each other's toes is called an operating system (kernel).
I disagree. Even though we've added layers of abstraction even since then, the quote still reminds me to think "what are we really doing here?" Apart from arguing if it is crazy or genius, I will say it has broadened my mind and for that I'm very thankful.
> The "operating system" (as in: a desktop environment) provides users with a unified approach to design, interaction and cooperation.
I do stand corrected with that: desktop environment, not OS.
> Any modern computing device has more than one process that needs to write to the disk; the machinery that allows them all to do that without stepping on each other's toes...
I agree, but I'll also point out that in the end I, as the end user, only want one specific thing written to disk at a time - the word document, excel sheet, game state, etc. The vast majority of disk writes are supporting the abstractions that support the abstractions that support the abstractions that support me saving my word document. I understand why that is the case, but I still think it's amusing.
so you're in some sort of text editor, and you think that's all you want written to disk at a time.
but meanwhile, you've got a messaging app running somewhere, and messages are coming in, and you'd like to have a local copy of those for performance reasons, so they're being written to disk.
you've got an RSS reader running, which just found out about a new posting somewhere; it's going to write it to disk so it can tell you about it at any time.
your media control panel - you just adjusted that because the piece of music you're listening to is a bit loud, and you expect it to remember the current setting the next time you restart, which means ... write to disk. and the music player itself - that's going to write to disk so that it knows where you were in the playlist next time.
and so on and so forth.
the idea of a computer being a device on which you run one program at a time vanished before MS-DOS even existed.
- Chuck Moore, interview in "Masterminds of Programming", 2009
I love this quote, but the Mac OS showed a benefit Moore completely missed: an OS can gave a uniform appearance to every bit of software on a machine, giving the impression of hardware and software meant for each other. I think there's a psychological effect that benefits work efficiency and pleasure in using the machine. It's also undoubtedly been a great selling point for Apple in particular. Agreed Aqua was a high-water mark with this.
Of course, the downside is that the OS rules the day, so your choice of software quickly falls into a very small selection based on what OS you'd like. FOSS (or at least open source) tried to run around that, but for anything not purely command line it's very difficult to just pass around source and adapt it to wherever and whatever you'd like.
Lastly, for the past decade or more we've seen the browser take the place of the OS in this. There are quite a few downsides to that approach, especially the loss of the impression of a unified product build for the end user. But the house of cards / tower of babel continues to grow...if you'll excuse me I'll go back to my 7400-series logic now...