Special Purpose Operating Systems
Special Purpose Operating Systems
There are many different kinds of special-purpose OS's, from those designed to
be very small to those designed to act as a network server. Generally such OS's
arn't useful on your desk, because of a minimal user interface, or lack of software.
This isn't a bad thing usually -- a fancy interface isn't really needed for such OS's,
and would slow things down, make the OS bigger, etc. In some cases, the division
between these OS's and the OS's in my main OS area is quite thin.
QNX is a realtime OS that also happens to be usable by end-users. It's available
for the PC only, and is focused for providing GUIs on embedded systems.
ThreadX is another realtime OS, being somewhat more traditional in that
it's useful solely for embedded purposes. It runs on a wide variety of different
hardware platforms.
Novell Netware is an OS designed to be a dedicated file and print server. It has
a minimal user interface, and is notable for it's high performance.
OS/400 is an operating system for IBM's AS/400 systems. It too is intended to be
used for network servers.
Real/32 is a multiuser modern descendant of CP/M, intended as a general multipurpose
operating system.