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.
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).