Future of computing may not necessarily rely on the market giants to develop high efficiency and performance-based OS. The ones that are popular today were also not all developed by industry tycoons in a research oriented organization, but by college students and dropouts. With various freelancing efforts and practices, OSs with better performance and high computing power were developed in past and will be developed in near future.
This post is basically discussing about the some "not-so-famous" operating systems which differ in their architecture, programming language and other aspects than the OSs available in the consumer market. Their utility may be domain-oriented i.e. specifically for performing tasks related to a specific area of operation but anyway, are better or upto the level of performance of the most famous ones. List of some of these OS is as follows:
Menuet OS: Populary known as MeOS, it is one of the fastest and minimum storage requirement operating system for desktop machines with a boot time of about 5 seconds. With the hardware requirements of 32 MB RAM and Pentium 90 processor, this OS can be accommodated in memory space of as low as 1.44 MB which is equal to the storage capacity of a Floppy Disk. Equivalent with the capabilities of modern OSs with support for networking based on TCP/IP, support for USB 2.0 and resolution support of upto 1280 X 1024. It is written in assembly language but can support for the execution of programs written in high-level programming language on the assembler core. Lynx RTOS: A proprietary of LynxWorks, “Lynx RTOS is a Unix-like real-time operating system” as mentioned on its Wikipedia page. It's a deterministic real-time OS, which means its response time can be calculated for a known period of time for performing real time operations. It is used for the operations of various aviation, military and telecommunication purposes. Companies like Boeing, Alcatel and Ericsson use Lynx RTOS for lot of their projects. KolibriOS: Born from the project of Menuet OS, it is developed by ex-USSR community since 2004. Based on the features of Menuet OS it additionally supports for NTFS file system while Menuet OS supported only for FAT 32 type file system. It runs on 8 MB RAM and multitask various processes and execute parallel system calls efficiently. Similar to Menuet OS, KolibriOS is also a monolithic kernel based OS that defines various high-level virtual interfaces over computer hardware and considers them as a part of the kernel. QNX: Recently gaining popularity with its association with BlackBerry 10 , QNX is supposed to be one of the most secure and successful OSs ever developed. Developed primarily for embedded systems, QNX is a micro-kernel based OS which considers all the services of an operating system as small tasks called servers. Including the drivers, file system etc. the partition of key functional components of the kernel from rest of the servers, makes it more secure as compared to other OSs.
Though these OSs aren’t made for the general user, they serve a specific purpose very well.
via Examiner National Edition Gadgets & Tech Channel Articles http://www.examiner.com/article/excellent-operating-systems-people-aren-t-aware-of?cid=roadrunner