The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, Debtember 08, 1999

Fastest Proprietary 80x86 Based Operating System

So the Slashdot crowd are raning about this new operating system called V2 OS. Since one of my many little hobbies is collecting and critiquing homebrew/alternative operating systems, I decided to give this one a try.

It seems that you can only get a binary so I can't comment on the code quality (all 80x86 Assembly code of course) but I did try to boot it. I have a spare 486 that normally runs a network monitor I wrote (one of these days I'll get around to releasing it) but hey, it's a PC and it'll spare me the trouble of rebooting my main system.

V2-OS
...................OK
System16 code is now in control.
ERROR: Failed to retieve [sic] information on the bootdisk...[1]
Creating PartitionList.
ERROR: Failed to retieve [sic] information on the bootdisk...[4]

[sic]'s are mine

Can't quite understand why it failed. Linux boots fine from floppy on this system. The only unusual thing about the system (other than it being a Compaq 486) is the lack of a harddrive (I actually use a modified tomsrtbt distribution—it's a nice single disk Linux distribution that makes a very good rescue disk for PCs). Everything else on the system is pretty much vanilla PC.

The last “Fastest Proprietary 80x86 Based Operating System” they featured at least came with source code. A good thing because it's long gone. All the links I have to it are no longer valid. I wonder how long this one will last?

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