December 15, 2011

No Operating System by Paul Siegel

Imagine a computer with no operating system. If you can do that,
you can imagine a computer that is extremely difficult to hack
into. A computer that is almost immune to viruses. A computer
that rarely crashes.
Too good to be true? No, such a computer has been invented.
Eric Hauk and Eric Uner, 2 former Motorola engineers, invented
this computer. They became so frustrated and annoyed by hack
attacks and by all the time they wasted installing software patches,
that they decided to change their server. Instead of an operating
system, they designed a chip storing a "kernel" of only about
4 Kilobytes of code. They founded Bodacion Technologies Inc.
( to market their computer, which is
called Hydra.
This is essentially the same idea that is used for medical devices
and for game-playing machines like Nintendo. Nintendo rarely
breaks down even though young hackers are constantly trying.
Why is an operating-system-less computer more sturdy than one
with an operating system? What do many viruses do? Once they
get into the system they manage to modify operating-system instructions
to kill the whole system. But if operating-system instructions
do not exist, or rather they exist in hardware, they cannot be
modified. Result: a computer you can depend on.
Of course, this tremendous reliability comes at price. Why does
the operating system have millions of lines of code? To increase
the flexibility of the computer. This is why such computers are
called general purpose computers. Without the O.S., the computer
loses this flexibility and becomes one that is tailored for a
given purpose.
Producing many tailored non-O.S. computers is now worthwhile
in order to achieve greater reliability.
It seems to me that this new technology is better than it appears
to be at first blush. It may even be used to make general purpose
computers more resistant to viruses. If a non-O.S. computer were
used as an input-output device for a conventional O.S. computer,
it could kill viruses before they reach the conventional computer.
I believe that non-O.S. computers have a great future!

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