Huayu for engineering students

Chapter 295 The First Appearance of the Operating System

Wang Fei went to play cards again, it was in the small meeting place next door, not far away.Today is Saturday, and Wang Fei and the other little sisters are gathering together for a rare drink, and the music is playing loudly.

The room was quite big, enough for them to worry about. During the decoration, a lot of sound insulation was considered, and Wang Xu's side was not disturbed much.

Wang Xu himself is leisurely writing some software plans, ranging from mathematical software to [-]D engines, and various software plans.

In terms of hardware, Wang Xu really has nothing to do. The equipment required for that thing is too much and too complicated, so he can only figure it out slowly.

But in terms of software, it is still possible to overtake and overtake. You don’t need to play any curves, and you can overtake directly on the straight.

The problem of software, especially the first version of software, is generally not a problem of development, but a problem of commercial operation.

DOS is not the best operating system, but it is the most commercially successful operating system.

Therefore, it can be continuously improved, and finally defeat countless competitors and become the overlord in the operating system.

Wang Xu didn't intend to go the way of the desktop system. No one can beat the Wintel alliance in this way. In this era, it is an unbreakable alliance.

Therefore, he can only find another way, taking the path of servers and workstations.

At least in the 90s, servers and workstations were still Unix.

Unix is ​​not a unified operating system, but a general term for a series of operating systems.

The Unix versions of each company are not completely compatible, and it is quite troublesome to transplant software between each other. Wang Xu took the path of Linux.

In 1983, Richard Stallman (Richard Stallman) founded the GNU project at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab), with the goal of creating a completely free Unix-like operating system.

In this project, Stallman and other volunteers developed the GNU tool chain (GCC, GDB, GNU Make, etc.), but the operating system kernel has never been completed.

And Linux is a self-entertaining work created by Linus Torvalds, a talented student at the University of Helsinki in Finland a year ago.

It is actually an exercise based on the GNU tool chain. At the beginning, it only worked on the basic kernel and IO parts, which is quite incomplete.

However, Linus, as a genius, has a very advanced idea. The microkernel he proposed can be replaced, and all other new operating system concepts are external applications, which makes this operating system stand out from many exercises.

Later, he made this kernel open source on the Internet and opened it to the world. He also explained his development philosophy in the attached file.

And allows anyone to modify and publish it, and also jumped out of the framework that free software did not allow commercial operation in the past, allowing this operating system to operate commercially for the first time.

Free, commercially available, and advanced in concept, this operating system was quickly recognized by countless programmers, and actively participated in the modification and update of this operating system.

With the joining of programmers from all over the world, this operating system has the first stable kernel.

About this year, maybe already, the first distribution of Linux will be packaged by a programmer named Patrick Wolf, and Linux will be on the right track since then.

It's just that Huaxia has not yet connected to the Internet, so Wang Xu can't get the source code of Linux at all, and Wang Xu really doesn't like the current Linux version.

In addition to the advanced concept, there is nothing special about the code itself.

Wang Xu's operating system plan actually came earlier than Linux. This is the first software product put into research and development in the supercomputing project. As early as the end of last year, young teachers had already invested in the development.

At present, it is only adapted for Intel series chips, and it can only support a few graphics cards and display modes, and the support for various peripherals is very limited.

Of course, this is enough. After all, most of Mizuki's internal computers are purchased in batches, and there are only a few types of graphics cards needed.

The system is still unable to call multiple external GPUs to realize Wang Xu's original dream of supercomputing.

However, it is simple, only supports PC stand-alone, only the command line, no application, and even the first development version with countless bugs, which appeared in March.

Wang Xu looked down on this thing a bit, so he didn't make any noise or publicize it with much fanfare. Although Professor Yan wanted to brag about it, he was persuaded by Wang Xu. Wait a minute, the whole body is not far away anyway, wait for it Alright let's play together again.

However, regardless of the publicity or not, Huaxia's first true desktop operating system just appeared so quietly.

Without using any animal name, Wang Xu simply named it Cos, the abbreviation of Chinese OS.

Well, yes, the Chinese operating system, although the first version does not support Chinese, but based on the 32-bit underlying logic, it can easily expand the support for various languages.

Of course, you can also understand it as the operating system of the Chinese people.

This operating system now only has some basic functions, it can be turned on, and some small tools have been transplanted for development.It doesn't even have basic network connection functions. The reason is that the corresponding network program has not been developed yet.

Wang Xu directly skipped the era of 8-bit and 16-bit, and the kernel is directly 32-bit. As a result, the final debugging and testing of this product can only be completed on machines above 80386.

In order to solve this problem, Wang Xu racked his brains to create a compatibility mode so that 16-bit computers can also run this operating system.

But that speed is really nothing to compliment. Apart from experiencing it, it really has no practical use.

However, the development can still be done on the old machine. After all, GNU itself can adapt to 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit compilation modes, as long as the parameters are changed during compilation.

This project has been very difficult from the very beginning, whether it is for teachers or students, after all, no one in Huaxia has really worked on the operating system.

Even the teacher who wrote the operating system textbook only knows the theory, and has never actually implemented an operating system. One can imagine the tediousness and troubles involved.

That is to say, Wang Xu's project plan was written in sufficient detail, and he even solved many difficult problems by himself, so that the first version of Cos was born smoothly.

What's more, at the very beginning, all development could only be done on the DOS operating system, not even Unix.

Then use the crude editing tools to develop something that cannot be executed on DOS at all. You can imagine the cumbersomeness.

However, with the official completion of the first version of Cos, the development work is on the right track. Finally, teachers and students who have been struggling for a long time can finally develop and debug on a machine.

This is all due to some commonly used Unix tools, which have also been transplanted, such as cat, grep and the like.

In fact, the source code of these things can be found, and the brothers who studied abroad brought them back early, without even Wang Xu's help.

-

(See you tomorrow)

(End of this chapter)