Show HN: The Unite real time operating system

Summary

tldr: A small i386 32-bit protected mode multi-tasking operating system modeled after QNX – What is Unite? Unite is an operating system in which everything is a process, including the things that you normally would expect to be part of the kernel. The hard disk driver is a user process, so is the file system running on top of it. The namespace manager is a user process. The whole thing (in theory, see below) supports network transparency from the ground up, you can use resources of other nodes in the network just as easily as you can use local resources, just prefix them with the node ID. In the late 80’s, early 90’s I had a lot of time on my hands. While living in the Netherlands I’d run into the QNX operating system that was sold locally through a distributor. The distributors brother had need of a 386 version of that OS but Quantum Software, the producers of QNX didn’t want to release a 386 version. So I decided to write my own. Luck had it that I ended up in Poland and that the lack of work there meant I could spend a lot of time on this (life was super cheap there back then compared to my savings). In the space of about a year I wrote a proof-of-concept kernel using DJGPP and a very kludgy development system that required me resetting the system after every failure. And there were lots of failures. Thousands of them, until, finally, one day I had a very rudimentary kernel and an ‘idle’ appliation running on top of it. The next couple of years, until February 1994 (right after my first child was born and I decided I should probably get serious about earning money) I steadily improved on the original until it had a full complement of tools, was self hosting and came with a window manager and some graphics demos. Why release this now? When Linux was still very young, in 1992, there was a now infamous dispute between Andrew Tanenbaum, of MINIX fame and Linux Torvalds. The stakes were high: Tanenbaum thought Linus was wasting his time and talent building yet another...