WebOS
WebOS is a computing research project started at the University of California, Berkeley to develop suitable software development abstractions for applications that run over a network. The abstractions it provides include:
- a filesystem that identifies data by uniform resource locators
- a location-independent resource naming system
- secure remote execution
- secure data access
- fail-safe transactions
Research on WebOS has continued at Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Washington.
More generally, WebOS refers to a software platform that interacts with the user through a web browser and does not depend on any particular local operating system. Such predictions date to the mid-1990s, when Marc Andreessen predicted that Microsoft Windows was destined to become "a poorly debugged set of device drivers running Netscape Navigator." More recently attention has focused on rumors that Google might produce a software platform.
History[edit | edit source]
The WebOS meme gained popularity in 1999 when a much touted startup, WebOS Inc. (at first know as MyWebOS), was founded by Berkeley grad Shervin Pishevar and Emory grad Drew Morris. WebOS licensed the WebOS technologies from Duke Univerity and University of Texas (Austin) and recruited Dr. Amin Vahdat, Professor of Computer Science at Duke, who had pioneered the WebOS technologies at University of California at Berkeley where he got his PhD on his WebOS research. WebOS acquired WebOS.org, which was created by a young Swedish programmer, Fredrik Malmer, who had created the first online desktop environment. Soon after, some of the top DHTML and Javascript programmers in the world such as Erik Arvidsson of WebFx fame, Dan Steinman, creator of the Dynamic Duo Cross-browser DHTML API, joined WebOS. WebOS raised over $10 million in financing from Impact Venture Partners led by Adam Dell and Grotech Capital. WebOS was launched with a vision of created the first web operating system complete with a WebOS API allowing developers to create Windows-like web applications that worked a extremely fast speeds by caching much of the code in the local browser. Arvidsson later launched Bindows, a framework very similar to the WebOS API, that does much of this and is used by many large companies and the US Military. WeBOS filed the first very WebOS patents in 1999. WebOS competed with another start up, Desktop.com, which was aimed more at the consumer market. WebOS was covered by many media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, financial Times, LA Times, Powerlunch on CNBC, Fox News and CNN and helped spread the WebOS meme further. WebOS launched Hyperoffice, a full office suite, back in 1999.
External links[edit | edit source]
- WebOS at Duke University
- GoogleOS? YahooOS? MozillaOS? WebOS? by Jason Kottke
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