kzinti wrote:
Finding information was also easy, there used to be something called books. You would buy them in libraries and they would provide you with the documentation you needed. One thing that was nice is that the author of these books were experienced and usually knew what they were talking about. This isn't true of the information you find on the Internet. Most of it is wrong, out of date, misleading or complete garbage.
Many of the books I bought in the 90s were bad. Typically, they claimed to be tutorials but skipped over some of the foundation concepts. Poor explanations were also normal in those days. (Standards have risen tremendously.) There was also a degree of "wrong, out of date, misleading or complete garbage" information, sometimes enough to completely confuse my untutored brain. I think the best way to find good information hasn't changed: find people who know their stuff and ask them. In the past there were clubs and local computer shops. Now there are online communities. I just wish I could have taken advantage of clubs and local computer shops in the 80s.
klange wrote:
On the one hand, I think the barrier to entry for building a hobby OS has gone down with the availability of information and the much more capable hardware we have today, but at the same time the barrier for building a viable OS people actually use has skyrocketed. More hardware, more complicated specifications, higher user expectations.
I've been thinking this too, to the point where I've opted out of designing an OS for other people to use,
but while I'm gaining simplicity, I'm losing tooling because I'm so very far from compatibility with other systems.
I had a good think about the past, wrote some stuff, deleted it, and came to the conclusion that keeping up with the professionals has always been difficult. If there was any point at which it seemed easier, it was approximately the mid 90s to the mid 00s. Linux was seen as a professional-quality OS, especially for servers, but in fact was seriously insecure and lacked features such as returning memory to the OS. In other words, standards were temporarily lower.
But let's not forget there have always been niches for specialized OSs to achieve minor commercial success. I believe they usually involve the author providing support.