Operating System Design - Index.html

Welcome to Operating System Design, by Xander Obrzut.

This is a paper on how to build an operating system in Visual Basic .Net 2005. This operating system will provide you with the basics of operating system design but will not be a true independent system as it sits on top of Microsoft XP and relies on XP to work. Think of it as a virtual machine, or an emulator, but remember that the essentials of operating system design taken from such books as Operating Systems - Design and Implementation by Tanenbaum Woodhull will be presented in easy to understand code fragments that will eventually compile together to form the basis of our system.

In this paper there is a single convention that is used to illustrate code and that is as follows (a black background with yellow text in monospace)

On a side note, I would like to raise an issue that I experienced at college recently. The current student body insist on calling programs 'applications'. Now, rather than applicationing as a hobby, I prefer programming! That said, what are they applying for any way in their 'applications'? This semantic irritation of mine has always been dormant, until now, because I have also heard of people refering to programs as 'executables'. This is another misnomer. What, exactly, is being executed? There fore, you will often hear me use a very old term in this paper - namely: program. That is what a body of source code is compiled into, for any youth present. We program, and when we are programming, we are writing source code! Programming is my hobby, and perhaps even by business, by design. There fore, if any of you in correspondence to me refer to applications, or executables, expect no response!

Now, let us move on to Stage One, with out any hesitation. You will find this paper moves at an incredible pace, so be prepared to keep up or get left for loser dust...