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A comment from Jeff has me thinking that we may be sitting fat and happy on our operating system laurels instead of demanding more and better from our rapidly evolving technology. Although he correctly states that we have had incremental improvements in both Windows and *nix, I would argue that they have been very incremental. Nothing big has happened on the OS front since the PARC lab at Stanford.

In 1978, I bought a Radio Shack TRS 80 Model I microcomputer, which was several orders of magnitude better than my previous micro, which I had built myself from a kit and which booted from paper tape. I had already been in the mainframe computer business as a programmer for several years. The TRS 80, with it's nifty CRT and cassette tape storage was the very epitome of state of the art.

At about that same time, PARC labs was inventing the graphical user interface (GUI), which was featured in the first Apples in the early eighties. Arguably, that change from the command line command line to the GUI was the last major sea change in operating systems. That happened over twenty years ago. Sure, the OS has evolved to support new devices and has improved a little bit here and a little bit there. But the Windows/Mac/Linux GUI is still where it's at.

So we only had to wait five or so years for the first paradigm change, and twenty-five years later we are still waiting for the second one. That may be progress, but when compared to the rest of the technology field, the rate of change is absolutely glacial! Somebody, I hope, in whatever the analogy is for a garage in Kazakhstan today, is getting close to perfecting the next big thing in operating systems.

Everything we have now is getting long in the tooth and in drowning in legacy code of more than 20 years ago, whether it be from Berkeley UNIX or Windows 3.1. I was serious about having the Operating System Blues. We need a neural interface and a driver for portable holograms. We need something none of us have ever heard of before. I'm way tired of the old stuff.

So, Jeff, don't settle for the ho-hum and the everyday miracles of Linux and OS X.  Since the GUI was invented we have gotten real cell phones, fax machines, social media, drives that write DVDs, YouTube, and a host of other cool things. All I'm asking for is a new paradigm in operating systems. What are they doing over at the PARC labs equivalent of the 21st century, playing first person shooter games and gorging on pizza? Let's see some OS progress!