Philosophy of MOE
Since MOE hasn't been worked on for quite a while, I'll refer to it
in past tense, although it still exists on my hard disk. The general
goals for MOE were: fast, easy to use, reliable, flexible. The main
things we wanted to change (as compared to DOS/Win 3.11) were:
no 640K limit and longer filenames. I know we also wanted more
flexible keyboard handling (the OS would support reporting multiple
simultaneous keypresses to applications) and there were probably
some other things we wanted, but I haven't thought about it for
a while. Being command line sorts of people, we were mostly
concerned with having cool command line features, but we wanted
to eventually add a GUI as well.
MOE Specifications
- 32 bit 386 protected mode Operating System
- Supports 2 monitors
- Eventually to be multitasking
- Will have both command line and graphical interface features
- Maybe it will have nifty stuff like TCP/IP support
Current status of MOE
Well, we started using 32 bit 386 protected mode fairly soon after
I got my 486sx/33 but since we didn't know of a convenient way to
compile C code to 32 bits, development was all in assembly, so
it proceded slowly. When I started college, I found other things
to do and started using Linux, which took away most of the reasons
for working on MOE. MOE's state, unchanged for quite a while now, is that
it can boot by itself, can access floppy and hard disks, works
fairly well with the keyboard, and has very basic video, serial
port, and parallel port routines. Since we don't have an executable
format defined, the very-mini-apps that exist are built-in to the
"kernel". These are a simple command line and minimalist
communications program. In summary, I'd have to say MOE is more
a collection of device drivers than anything else.
MOE Design/Programming Team
- Jeremy Boulton (boultonj@ugcs.caltech.edu)
- Mike Thielman
- Jeff Ronne
- Head tester/bug finder: Brian Shannon