Operating Systems that *are* the application

Question

Conventional operating systems launch and provide services to applications. The app is like a black-box to the OS, and the app provides the UI for getting real work done with the computer.

Are there any operating systems which are the other way around? Where the OS provides the UI for doing useful work with the computer, and applications come in the form of plugins that teach the OS how to do new tricks?

Like, say the OS is geared towards communication, and instead of a third-party application providing an SSH terminal, it provides a plugin of the basic SSH mechanism that the OS can use anywhere. Now the spell-checker can load a dictionary of customer names over a secure channel, because the spell-checker was also a plugin; uncompiled and with lots of meta-data so the OS can interpret it at a higher-level and change the call to load the database.

This is pure curiosity, so it doesn't matter if the OS is commercial, a hobby, or academic research.

Answer 1

Embedded and appliance system are all tightly coupled systems that mostly describe what you're talking about. I mean things like routers (though there's little UI), phones, cameras, MP3 players, cars, modern fridges, TVs... You name it.

Answer 2

The classic example is probably Pick an operating system combined with a database.

For most business tasks where all you are running is an SQL server and an SQL console there isn't much need for a general purpose OS in the way. This is certainly the way people like VMWARE want to go, with the RDBMS talking directly to services offered by the VM and no need for a heavy weight copy of windows server.

Answer 3

Any desktop-like OS (e.g., Mac OS & Windows), does provide a UI in which applications act as plug-ins that provide the OS with new behavior.

I don't see how an OS is going to tell from metadata what the plug-in really wants beyond low-level services and how to go about configuring itself automagically for use with a particular user. Although, a web browser comes closer to this description.

Answer 4

Windows Vista almost had something like this when WinFS was planned to be a part of the OS. With WinFS, you could define different storage types beyond the file and folder types so that any application can share things like contacts, locations, photos, and the relationships between them.