On Tue, 2002-02-19 at 21:38, Chris Moore wrote:
> This is gonna sound crazy but how hard would it be to make ruby boot as 
> something of a microkernel? Add some device drivers and a filesystem and 
> some kind of console (the built in shell?) and you're halfway to a 
> script based OS... just a thought me and a friend had...
> 
> The next step is making file management tools, an editor, etc.
> 
> Any thoughts?

A _lot_ of work would have to go into this, and in the end, you'd
probably end up with something like Squeak. (a smalltalk implementation,
see http://www.squeak.org). I think a better idea would be to write a
replacement for the bash, zsh, or csh for the *nix operating systems.
There are a couple of halfway-done perl implementations of this sort of
thing lying around out there. See
http://www.focusresearch.com/gregor/psh/ for more stuff about that.