IdeaFarm (tm) Piggyback Distributed Operating System <> IP-DOS (tm) is a small software system that runs "on top of" MS Windows. From an engineering point of view, it is not an operating system at all; it is just a simple application program, like a photo image editor or a database or spreadsheet program. To use IP-DOS (tm), you don't need to "install" it so that it "boots" when you turn on your computer. For most users, IP-DOS (tm) is just another web site; the IP-DOS (tm) operator console is a web page that you can click into from this web site.

Computers store information by making small magnetic dots on the surface of a spinning plastic disk coated with iron oxide. Each dot represents either 0 or 1, and groups of 8 dots are used to represent, for example, each letter of the text that you are reading. To store some text, such as "Hello, World!", early programmers had to know what brand of hard drive was in the computer. Worse, they had to know a bunch of numeric codes that they needed to use to tell the hard drive exactly where to put each magnetic dot. It was all a big pain in the ass.

Someone eventually said, "This is nonsense. I am going to write some software that will handle all of the dot magnetizing details. Then I will be able to write code that just tells that software what text to write, and what name to give that text (so that it can retrieve it for me later)." My "disk operating system", or DOS, software will need to know how to input commands from me, output text to me, make magnetic dots to store text, and read magnetic dots to retrieve that text. Such sequences of magnetic dots were called "files", because the idea of a manila paper filing folder in a Steelcase filing cabinet was familiar to the business customers of IBM. The sequences of magnetic dots weren't, of course, manila paper file folders in a Steelcase filing cabinet. The idea of file folders stored in file cabinets was an abstraction that would help programmers and their business employers understand what was going on with the magnetic dots on spinning disks.

Early disk operating system, or DOS, software presented application programmers with the simple abstraction of manila file folders in Steelcase filing cabinets, and took care of all of the dot magnetizing and dot finding details. These early computers used punched cards to input programs and data, and used large printers to output reports calculated from that data. The card readers were, by definition, not programmable, and the programming of the printers was trivial. (Double space, triple space, single space, skip to the top of the next page.) It was the invention of disk drives that created a need for operating system software, because the disk drive was the only complex part of the system, from a programming point of view. As other hardware was invented, the mission of the operating system software expanded but did not change in essence. Today's operating systems still present a simple abstraction of all of the attached hardware, an abstraction that allows application programmers to tell each device, in simple terms, what to do, in a way that frees the programmer from needing to worry about the "dot magnetizing details".

IP-DOS (tm) is called an "operating system" because it presents application programmers with a new programming abstraction. The 'D' does not stand for "disk"; it stands for "distributed". IP-DOS (tm) presents application programmers with the abstraction of a single "global virtual computer" that is computationally distributed over millions of personal computers. Imagine how excited early programmers would have been to be able to insert their punched cards into a computer of practically infinite power. I remember putting a program of 500 punched cards into the card reader of our IBM OS/SVS 360 at UCLA in 1973, and coming back the next morning to get my output listing. Imagine how excited we would have been to be able to write a program whose punched cards filled an entire supertanker, run that program on a computer at our home, and get the results instantly! That is what IP-DOS (tm) will do when it is fully deployed. IP-DOS (tm) is designed to present application programmers with a simple, beautiful, and original programming abstraction that is "backed" by practically infinite computational resources.