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IPFS News Link • Technology: Software

This Company Built a New Operating System for Computers That Don't Exist

• https://newatlas.com

Google, Facebook, Uber, you name it - they all run Linux and NanoVMs is betting it can do one better at least for cloud systems.

Linux happens to be 30 years old now and is largely the same as an ancient operating system, Unix, which is now 50 years old - an operating system built to run on machines like the PDP-7 that took up entire walls and cost half a million dollars when it came out in today's money.

Even when Linux was released in 1991, software was still run on real computers like the 386 with speeds bursting up to 40MHz. It wasn't until around 10 years later that companies such as Citrix and VMWare introduced commercialized virtualization and virtual machines started being used. Around this same time we got SMP capable CPUs with real multithreading. Another five years went by and then a small bookstore in Seattle called Amazon unleashed AWS EC2 to the masses and the public cloud was born.

The funny thing is though we still use Linux as the guest operating system in the cloud even though it has concepts that are very foreign to the cloud environment such as floppy and usb support, or the notion that you should manage a full blown operating system inside of a virtual machine that can have its entire existence flicked off with a switch. This is exacerbated by the fact that many tech companies employ thousands or tens of thousands of software engineers and run tens to hundreds of thousands of virtual machines.