XPALIDOCIOUS

Dick Pountain/18 November 2001/13:52/

It's no good, I can't keep it to myself any longer. I'm suffering from a gross emotional deficiency and I need to share it with all of you in order to find healing and closure. Get ready for it... I can't work up any enthusiasm over Windows XP. Phew, I feel better already!

I haven't reliably diagnosed the source of my affective dysfunction yet. Maybe it's simple distraction, caused by trivial externalities like the fact that we are currently on the verge of what may turn into a devastating world war against a ruthless enemy bent on jihad. That we happen to also be perched on the rim of the worst global depression since the 1930s may be partly to blame  too. (Hint: if you are currently negotiating any contracts, ask to be paid in tinned baked beans, to be delivered in water-proof packaging to a concrete bunker in the Shetland Isles). Maybe it's merely silly old Seasonal Affective Disorder caused by the cold drizzle that wafts down from the leaden London sky. Or perhaps it's just long overdue burnout with the computer industry and all its infernal works. Whatever, it is preventing me from rejoicing in a manner that Microsoft's mighty publicity machine would approve. (As an aside, how the hell did they miss the opportunity to tie its launch in with Harry Potter? They even have the Wizards already in there.)

Until I resolve these emotional intricacies, I'm stuck with the rather dull working hypothesis that perhaps I'm 'experiencing' Windows XP as just a cosmetic gloss applied to an already barely-adequate product (Windows 2000) that was decades overdue. I've been rambling for years in these columns about matters of operating system design, object-orientation and the potential utility that has been squandered by the marketing-fixated conservatism of the software industry. The launch of Windows XP represents a real culmination for Microsoft: it has finally united the code bases of its divided OS families into a single product, achieving a fully 32-bit operating system only 16 years after Intel introduced the 32-bit processor.
That makes this the perfect time for me to similarly unite all my mini-whinges into one great super-rant. I won't feel at all inhibited by commercial considerations or matters of realism - I'm going to shamelessly play the 'what-if' game, by setting out what I would have expected a PC operating system to look like by now, knowing what I know now about the alternative technologies that have been available, the research findings that have been ignored, the opportunities that have been lost.

If I felt a need to justify this cavalier approach by applying some bogus philosophy, I could easily pretend to believe in the trendy 'many universes' interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that what I'm about to describe is what lucky PC users are actually now using in some alternative universe - unfortunately it is a universe that suffers from a collapse of its superposed quantum states into decoherence whenever it comes in contact with a Microsoft End-User Licence Agreement...

This alternative operating system, which I'll call WNOS (Why Not OS) for brevity, is strongly object-oriented, its tiny kernel consisting of little more than a mechanism for allocating memory and unique identifiers to objects, plus a minimal communications engine to dispatch local messages between them. Around that lie layers of templates describing generic protocol stacks, from which real instances that implement actual protocols can be spawned as required: these protocols communicate with everything from the local disk drives to video-conferences across the Internet. Thanks to this architecture the basic operating system is barely a tenth of the size of Windows, because so much of its code is intelligently reused. The whole point of its design is to provide completely hardware-independent I/O, whereby any 'application' object can be instructed to use any communication channel (either existing, or not yet invented) by merely pointing it at a new protocol object. Network links have long ago been decently hidden behind the skirting board - as all good  plumbing should be - and the nightmare of configuring communication links is over. If you don't believe it is a nightmare, reflect for a moment, why do you buy this magazine, and why do you need to read its Real World section? And if you don't believe hardware and location independence in an OS are possible, then check out Plan 9 or Inferno (and those were just early  experiments).

All WNOS peripherals are active servers with their own processors, and they are smart, containing stored 'personalities' and device drivers. And of course it goes without saying that they are both wireless and self-configuring. But Bluetooth isn't ready yet I hear someone bleat - well DECT has been working for years (as for that matter has infra-red) and is in several ways superior to Bluetooth. The smart discovery facility built into WNOS can detect all the peripherals that are within range and which  protocols they understand, then  automatically speak to them over a free channel. Among these peripherals are of course those little green boxes, broadband Internet gateways, that are scattered around your house like telephone points (actually they are the telephone points). Whenever connection is made, updated device drivers for any connected peripheral may come down the line using push technology similar to that used by AOL. Losing a connection is not really a problem either because WNOS obviously contains integrated message queuing - a bit like that in Windows 2000 but much, much smarter in that it can reconnect using any alternative channels that it can find. I could go on and on like this, but I feel a sob coming on...