I was recently reflecting on my startup days at Netscape more than a decade ago. What was compelling about what we were trying to accomplish at the time was to make operating systems irrelevant.

Netscape tried to accomplish this by embedding what once were typically operating system functions into a multi-protocol window onto the world (the web browser). It had your text editor, the aforementioned web browser, a window system (aka frames) and a programming language or two (Java and JavaScript) to tie it all together and turn it into a general purpose information and communication appliance. The consensus at the time was that this would make the underlying operating system (*nix, Windows, Apple, OS/2, whatever) irrelevant. If you had this tool on your computer, you could work on any computer, any platform, and be able to do all of your information related tasks.

Needless to say, this grand idea failed. The browser is still around, but the original idea was lost along the way. New browsers don't come with the same tools we tried to provide back then. Java and calendaring in particular are now separate add-ons, as is the email package - available separately.

But does that mean Netscape lost? Well yeah, Netscape did. They're gone. But the concept of operating system irrelevance didn't. As I write this (on a Windows box), I've got windows open to Unix servers, I've got Unix command shells and utilities, I've got typical Unix programming languages and databases and web servers all running in this alien environment. It's actually impressive how far we've come. I'm currently dumping a remote Linux file system to a local (Windows) disk drive using nothing but Unix commands. ssh, tar, bash. These are all running on the Windows box using Cygwin, which comes with a couple hundred native Unix commands. I've got my familiar LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web programming environment via XAMPP; which I'm developing with emacs. Remote system monitors running via X (the Unix windowing system) and being displayed on my desktop via Cygwin/X. I've even got my mouse setup with hover-to-focus mode.  The only thing that provides solid evidence that I'm not running a Unix operating system is the IE icon on the desktop (which I never use).

And this is all running on Windows.

So the operating system is completely irrelevant. It's just something that sits in the background and allows you to launch programs. Just like we envisioned back in the '90s. OK, not exactly like we envisioned, but I'm quite comfortable with the end result.