Norwegian developer Kurt Skauen began writing AtheOS in 1996, and at first he called it ALT OS.
Kurt was an Amiga developer, but Commodore Amiga computers were built on the Motorola 68000 processor, and by the early 90's Intel was clearly becoming dominant. He started writing his OS with the hope one day it could become an Amiga clone for Intel, but he was more directly influenced by the new BeOS operating system from Be Inc.
BeOS was 32-bit, but used BFS: a 64-bit file-system with journals, and explicit support for multimedia files integrated as data-streams via what Linux calls MIME or Media-Types. In other words: .mp3, .mp4, .mkv, .pdf, .md, etc. MIME types were increasingly important with the rise of multimedia for the Internet.
File-System, Kernel, and Graphics:
So like BFS, AFS was modern from the start in anticipation of working with the internet.
Skauen single-handedly wrote the file-system, and his own kernel from scratch. The kernel also included modern features for the time including preemption, symmetric multi-processing, and multi-threading.
The consumer editions of Windows' NT kernel, and Mac OS wouldn't include these features until 2000 and 2001, respectively.
The kernel included drivers for hard drives, PS/2 mice & keyboards, TCP/IP networking stack & drivers for several common network interface cards, and accelerated GPU drivers for Matrox, S3 Virge, and Nvidia GPU's. Plus a fallback VESA 2.0 mode without acceleration.
Web Browser & Applications:
Kurt also made it partially POSIX-compliant, and Unix-like by porting GNU's C library, compiler, and core utilities.
From there he wrote a multi-threaded object-oriented graphical user interface in C++ without the need for the X11 Window System that's standard for Linux and other Unix systems.
It included drag & drop, and a global clipboard.
He wrote several GUI apps including a desktop-manager, CPU and memory monitors, file manager, Disk Manger, and Aterm; an xterm-like terminal emulator.
Perhaps most importantly:
He wrote the ABrowse web browser by porting KDE Konqueror's KHTML render engine. The same engine that Apple's Safari, Microsoft's Edge, Mozilla's Firefox, and Google Chrome were built from.
And finally, he ported Emacs v19 to AtheOS.
All from one man, and not to mention the couple-hundred apps and tools that run in the terminal.
AtheOS Goes Public:
Kurt hosted a website about the project that included a CVS repository for the source code. All running on an AtheOS machine via Apache web-server.
People found the website, and started compiling and installing it on their own computers. Skauen provided documentation for developing with his OS, and encouraged users to write drivers and share them.
However, he was clear that he wanted to be the sole developer of the OS itself. There were people excited about this new OS.
Syllable Desktop OS
In 2001, AtheOS had reached version 0.3.7 and suddenly no one heard from Kurt Skauen for a while. For about 9 months there was code pushed to the AtheOS source repository.
Not knowing if Kurt would ever return; three users decided to fork AtheOS into a new project called Syllable which started officially in 2002 and continued through Syllable's final release 2012 at version 0.6.7.
I am currently working on a video about both operating systems, and I currently know less about Syllable under the hood.
However, Syllable is much closer to a complete OS for the average person.
It has taskbar, virtual-workspaces, a 'Start' menu with sub-categories of GUI apps. There's a web browser, e-mail client, audio/video player, and PDF viewer. Syllable Desktop is comparable to older Linux distributions whereas AtheOS would only appeal to developers.
What Is It With Scandinavians & Open-Source Operating Systems?
Okay, so I know Finnland isn't technically Scandinavia, but you see my point right?
Torvalds & Skauen both wrote open-source UNIX-like OS kernels/shells from scratch using GNU's userland tools, and both started something that grew to an impressive operating system because people got excited about it.
Initially I planned to d a video about Syllable, but I found VMware images for both OS'es. I haven't installed either onto actual hardware, but I have attempted to install AtheOS into a VM from an .iso image.
I was unable to get it to boot so far. The original method is done via 4 floppy-disk images.
I THINK Skauen may have picked up developing AtheOS again sometime after Syllable started because someone created an Atheos .iso as recently as 2021. Also, AtheOS has a 1920x1080p resolution in the display manger settings. Syllable's max resolution is only 800x600 or something similar.
You can download and run both from:
https://syllable.metaproject.frl
There's a section with links to the AtheOS site.
There are VM images for VMware, VirtualPC, Virtual Box, and QEMU.
I had to convert AtheOS VMware image to VMware 6.0 or lower to get it to boot on Workstation 15.
It won't boot if you try to give it 2 CPU's either.
I already have about 10 minutes worth of video edited, and that's just for AtheOS because I haven't really even dug into Syllable yet.
Consider giving this a like, share, and subscribe if you'd like to see the video when it's done as I will be sharing it here on Hive.
Also, check out my Youtube, Rumble, Bitchute, etc if you are into computers and technology.
I have videos about the first Playstation, lots of Linux PC/server stuff, and I've done videos about Haiku OS, Remix OS, Windows 11, Android, etc.
Thank you for reading, and... Watch, you'll learn something.