Terry A. Davis wasn’t satisfied with DOS, Linux, Windows or OS X. So, he coded his very own 64-bit PC operating system.
Davis – who worked on LoseThos full-time for 7.3 years – wrote every one of the 125,024 lines himself, “without GPL code, linkage or dependence.”
“Technically, I started LoseThos in about 1993, when I wrote a TASM program that ran in DOS which switched to protected mode on a 486. It did little more than read the keyboard and echo to the screen, but was multi-tasking,” Davis explains on the LoseThos website.
“I set it aside until 2003 when I resurrected it and worked full-time, seriously, on it. A compiler (interpreter at the time) was designed into-it from the start, even before a file system. I put the text of files I wanted to compile as raw data in my TASM assembled module.”
So, what makes LoseThos different, than say, Linux?
Well, according to Davis, LoseThos is “orders of magnitude simpler” than Linux to “better fulfill” the promise of open source.
“[Basically], the vision for LoseThos is a souped-up Commodore 64, that runs x86_64 code with multicore support and multitasking. Astoundingly, the Commodore 64 did not use ASCII and that same bold spirit is present in LoseThos where no standard is assumed and everything is newly designed from scratch.
“[However], this is not a 1970’s main frame operating system and, no, it has nothing to do with Commodore 64 emulation – it’s x86_64.”
Additional information about LoseThos and download options can be accessed here, while the LoseThos “constitution” is available here.
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