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This linklist is now divided into three parts according to the tree days of the "Wizards of OS" conference. This is the first part. Here is the second part, and here the third. 
  
General  
History  
Research  
Emulators  
Unix et alii 
Free Unix  
     Linux 
     Unixes' Standardization Efforts 
Free OSs  
Net OSs 
Distributed OSs 
Object-Orientation  
Realtime OSs  
Embedded Systems OSSs  
Other OSs  
Interfaces/GUIs  
Social  
Copyleft/Open Source 
Total World Domination (MS) 
Newsgroups 
Books  
 

Jargon File: 
operating system: /n./ [techspeak] (Often abbreviated `OS') The foundation software of a machine, of course; that which schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user between applications. The facilities an operating system provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around its host machines. Hacker folklore has been shaped primarily by the Unix, ITS, TOPS-10, TOPS-20/TWENEX, WAITS, CP/M, MS-DOS, and Multics operating systems (most importantly by ITS and Unix).  

Jargon File: 
wizard /n./ 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works (that is, who groks it); esp. someone who can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency. Someone is a hacker if he or she has general hacking ability, but is a wizard with respect to something only if he or she has specific detailed knowledge of that thing. A good hacker could become a wizard for something given the time to study it. 2. A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people; one who has wheel privileges on a system. 3. A Unix expert, esp. a Unix systems programmer. This usage is well enough established that 'Unix Wizard' is a recognized job title at some corporations and to most headhunters. 

Linux' Mindshare Went Through The Roof: 
"Linux had no mindshare with the people who make the decisions. I think that's one of the big things that's been happening for the last three or four months is that mindshare went through the roof. ...  
     And what I think will happen is that some company -- maybe not IBM, but a company like IBM -- will just happen in the future where they're already doing multiplatform support, because everybody has it if you're in the big league. And they're just going to add Linux to the list of platforms they support. And then you're going to be able to buy one machine and Linux will be installed on it. I expect that to happen within a year.... Well, Intel surprised me by being so about-face. I had talked to Intel before, but Linux was a dirty word, and that was just a year ago. And Intel has been very positive lately, which is nice....  
     I think that there are a lot of people in Redmond scratching their heads wondering "What the hell can we do?" ... And at the same time they have a really hard time coming to grips with the fact that it's a market outside their market; one they can't direct. And that's probably why they're nervous. I don't know...I don't think they're really nervous. I think they're mildly nervous. I don't think Bill spends the nights lying there thinking about Linux."  
(Linus Torvalds interviewed by Robert McMillan, LinuxWorld, October 1998) 
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1998-10/lw-10-torvalds.html  

The MyOS Network (links to ressource pages for most every OS) 
http://www.MyOS.com/os.shtml 

Open Source Software Virtual University  
see Course 500: Operating systems  
and Course 600: System programming  
http://www.softpanorama.org/  

PC Webopedia's OS page  
http://www.pcwebopedia.com/Operating_Systems_cat.html  

ZDNet Webopedia's OS page 
http://www.zdwebopedia.com/TERM/o/operating_system.html 

whatis?com's brief definition of an OS 
http://www.whatis.com/operatin.htm 

OS News 
http://www.osnews.com/ 

How Linux Could Kill Windows NT, Jesse Berst, Editorial Director ZDNet AnchorDesk  
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_2241.html  

The Internet Operating System Counter (September 98: 1. Linux 2. Windows 95/98/NT) 
http://www.hzo.cubenet.de/ioscount/ 

Snap's Link list on OSs  
http://direct.snap.com/directory/category/0,16,direct-1314,00.html?st.cn.re..sn  

Hideki's Page of Operating Systems   
http://www.yk.rim.or.jp/~hideki/os/index-e.html   

Articles on  OS/2 Warp, Windows95 (Preview Edition), MacOS System 7.5.1 , Linux, and Solaris.   
http://www.unt.edu/UNT/departments/CC/Benchmarks/benchmarks_html/julaug95/opsys.htm   

PC Professional: Betriebssysteme 98  
http://www.zdplanet.de/produkte/artikel/sw/os/os-wf.htm  

Umberto Eco explains why the Mac is Catholic and DOS is Protestant  
http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/html/Xian/EcosEssay.html  
   
McKenzie Wark explains how there are two kinds of theory in this world: Microsoft theory and open standards theory  
http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive/0100.html   
  

The Virtual Museum of Computing   
http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/other/museums/computing.html    

Zuse's Z3 besitzt drei Gruppen von Befehlen: Arithmetik-Befehle (Addition, Multiplikation), I/O-Befehle (Einlesen, Ausgeben) und Speicherbefehle (Laden, Speichern).   
http://www2.informatik.uni-halle.de/~thurm/z3/   

International Conference on the History of Computing   
14. -16. August 1998, Paderborn, Germany   
http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~widiger/ICHC/   

Multics, an influential operating system, begun in 1965 and still in use today.   
http://www.best.com/~thvv/multics.html   
     Fernando José Corbató, aka Corby, was the leader of the Multics development project at MIT Project  
     MAC in from its beginnings in 1963 until the mid-1970s 
     http://www.best.com/~thvv/corby.html 
 

Answers to frequently asked questions for comp.os.research (in 3 parts)  
http://www.best.com/~bos/os-faq/FAQ-1.html   
http://www.best.com/~bos/os-faq/FAQ-2.html   
http://www.best.com/~bos/os-faq/FAQ-3.html    

Francisco J. Ballesteros: Links on OS research  
http://www.gsyc.inf.uc3m.es/~nemo/os.html  

Current Operating Systems Projects and OS-related research on the Web, by Patrick Bridges   
http://www.cs.fit.edu/~dclay/os.html   

VMRG Operating systems research page   
http://wwwcs.newcastle.edu.au/VMRG/OS/OS.html   

The Open Group Research Institute: Operating Systems Collected Papers (Last revision: January 1996)   
http://www.osf.org/os/os.coll.papers/   

Oberon, an ongoing research project at the ETH, Zürich, launched in 1985 by Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht  
http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/  

Paramecium: An extensible object-based kernel supporting parallel programming  
Andrew Tannenbaum, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam  
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~leendert/paramecium.html  
   
A Caching Model of Operating System Kernel Functionality   
David R. Cheriton and Kenneth J. Duda, Stanford University   
http://www-dsg.stanford.edu/papers/cachekernel/main.html   
    
First Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '94)   
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~lepreau/osdi/  
  
The 720OS, an infinitely scalable and robust platform for communication throughout the known network, and in particular for communications beyond the known network. The author of the original release believes that all operational monadic systems on this planet today are hardwired with the Original Source within us; all we really have to find, then, is a Compiler... 
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/1720/720faq.html 
 

Emulation Software R&D WWW Page. Information on CPU and OS emulators   
http://www.uruk.org/~erich/emu/main.html   

More emulator links   
http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/other/museums/computing.html#simulators   
   
A PDP-8/E Simulator for the Apple Macintosh   
http://www.han.de/~bb/pdp8e/pdp8e.html   

Commodore 64 emulator for the PC   
http://ccs64.fatal-design.com/   
   

On the Early History and Impact of Unix (Ch. 9 of the Hauben's "Netizen's Netbook")   
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106.x09   

Unix Programmer's Manual, First Edition (1971)  
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/1stEdman.html  

Dennis M. Ritchie's homepage 
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/index.html 

Ken Thompson's homepage 
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/ken/ 

Subject: History of C, UNIX and Smalltalk. Creators Admit UNIX, C Hoax   
http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~dalessio/unix.funny2.html   
   
Unix Guru Universe 
http://www.ugu.com  

AIX (IBM's Unix) FAQ  
http://www.tu-darmstadt.de/hrz/hrzpub/sw/betriebssystem/aix/aixfaq/aixfaq.html  
  
Sun's Solaris   
http://192.9.48.5/solaris/   
 

(For Unix see above)  

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia    
http://www.FreeSoft.org/CIE/index.htm   

Markt der Netzwerkbetriebssysteme   
http://www.gateway.de/artikel/9806030/   

John Kirch: Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX  
"Why Windows NT Server 4.0 continues to exist in the enterprise would be a topic appropriate for an investigative report in the field of psychology or marketing, not an article on information technology. Technically, Windows NT Server 4.0 is no match for any UNIX operating system"  
http://www.kirch.net/unix-nt.html  

Novell NetWare  
http://www.novell.com/netware5/  

Sabine Helmers, Ute Hoffmann, Jeanette Hofmann: Standard Development as Techno-social Ordering. The Case of the Next Generation of the Internet Protocol   
http://duplox.wz-berlin.de/docs/ipng/  

Beowulf is a project to produce parallel Linux clusters from off-the-shelf hardware and freely available software, started by NASA in 1994, spreading to universities  
http://www.beowulf.org/  
  

Bell Lab's Plan 9   
Thompson and Ritchie created the UNIX operating system in 1969. "Pike and Thompson took a look and said, 'What would we do differently if we started again?'" said Ritchie. "The Plan 9 operating system is the outgrowth of that analysis."    
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/ 
http://www.att.com/press/0795/950718.bla.html   

Inferno, the successor to Plan 9, developed at Sciences Research Center of Bell Laboratories, the research arm of Lucent Technologies 
http://www.lucent-inferno.com/   
     Dorward, Pike, Presotto, Ritchie, Trickey and Winterbottom: The Inferno Operating System 
     http://www.lucent.com/ideas2/perspectives/bltj/winter_97/paper01/index.html  
     Piroz Mohseni: Fanning the NC Flames: Inferno, the Network OS 
     http://www.ncworldmag.com/ncworld/ncw-04-1997/ncw-04-inferno.html 
     Inferno mailing lists, news groups and archive 
     http://www.isr.umd.edu/%7Edoc/Inferno/Mail-list/ 

Tanenbaum's Amoeba 
http://www.cs.vu.nl/pub/amoeba/ 

Mach   
Project Mach was an operating systems research project of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science from 1985 to 1994   
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/mach/public/www/mach.html   
     The Mach Shared Objects Project, at Department of Computer Science, University of Utah,  
     funded by ARPA   
     http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/mso/index.html   

GNU Hurd  (based on the Mach kernel) 
http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/software/hurd/hurd.html   
     Towards a New Strategy of OS Design (paper on Hurd)   
     http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/hurd/hurd-paper.html   

Sun's Java, it's incorporated into all major Web browsers, and soon will be built into next-generation telephones, TV set-top boxes, smart cards that fit in your wallet, and many other consumer and business devices.   
http://www.java.sun.com   
http://www.sun.com/javaos  
     James Gosling and the Java Team: PC Magazine's Persons of the Year 1997 
     http://www.zdnet.com/products/content/pcmg/1622/pcmg0102.html 
     Sun VP James Gosling forecasts distributed computing technologies (interviewd by Michael Vizard, 
     InfoWorld Electric, August 24, 1998) 
     http://www.idg.net/idg_frames/english/content.cgi?vc=docid_9-68433.html 
     Java-PC on top of DOS  
     http://java.sun.com:81/products/javapc/index.html  
     Sun's JINI (Java Intelligent Network Infrastructure)  
     http://www.wired.com/wired/6.08/jini.html  
     JOS in Java under GNU license  
     http://www.jos.org  

An Information Service on the JAVA language. Created and maintained by members of the Centre Universitaire d'Informatique, University of Geneva 
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/java/index_eng.html 

TRON (The Realtime Operating System Nucleus) originally developed by Ken Sakamura, Tokyo University, now likely running on your VCR, car navigation system and digital camera. It's non-proprietary and GNU software development tools for TRON specification chips are available.  
http://tron.um.u-tokyo.ac.jp/TRON/  

Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), the ORB (Object Request Broker) provides interoperability between applications on different machines in heterogeneous distributed environments and seamlessly interconnects multiple object systems. 
http://www.acl.lanl.gov/CORBA/ 
     The Object Management Group, a consortium of software vendors and end users developing CORBA 
     http://www.omg.org/  

The operating system is history. 
That is, if Oracle and Sun Microsystems are successful in their joint effort to be announcedtoday to develop a new type of computer that doesn't require an operating system. 
     "The product will likely include the Oracle8i database environment running on Sun hardware, using only a Unix microkernal [sic!]," AMR Research in Boston wrote in a report on the pending announcement. "The microkernal is expected to be Solaris-based, Sun's Unix platform, but it may be one of the several open-source versions of Unix."
     "Dissatisfaction is extremely high with Microsoft, much higher than with anyone else," an analyst said. "It looks like the market might respond very favorably to this." ( Randy Weston,CNET News.com, December 14, 1998) 
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C29868%2C00.html?dd.ne.tx.ts1.1214

Speculation centers on a speech Oracle's Ellison gave last month at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, in which he outlined plans to bundle the company's database software on hardware systems that don't need Microsoft's Windows NT or rival operating system software.... Although there will be no operating system, the computers and Oracle's software would still require a "microkernel," essentially a tiny piece of software to help Oracle's database software talk to the hardware. In Las Vegas, Ellison did not specify what type of kernel the company would select, but candidates include Linux, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX "flavor" of Unix, Solaris, the forthcoming OS X Apple Computer, FreeBSD, and NetBSD. ( Reuters, CNET News, December 11, 1998)
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,29854,00.html?st.ne.ni.rel
 

Object Systems Group Bibliography 
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/osgrefs/file=/OSG/publications/Bib/osg.bib&htgrep=/osgrefs&ftpstyle=fi 

OO Type Theory  
This page collects information about research on type systems for object-oriented programming.  
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/OSG/research/Hop/types.html 
  

*OS/9 and OS/9000, UNIX like real-time OS from Microware Systems Corporation, Des 
                         Moines, Iowa. This summary page is the main entry point to 
                         the World Wide Web pages of the OS-9/9000 support 
                         within the Real-Time Computing and Embedded Systems 
                         section of the Information Technology division 
                         (CERN/IT-CE-MS) at CERN. 
http://wwwcn.cern.ch/ce/ms/os9/os9.html  

RTMX O/S 
http://www.rtmx.com/ 

http://www.realtime-info.be/encyc/market/rtos/rtos.htm 

http://www.eg3.com/ulc/realxulr.htm 
 

JavaOS 
http://www.sun.com/javaos/ 

Epoch32 

TRON 

Win CE 
http://www.zdplanet.de/produkte/artikel/sw/9805/os13-wf.htm 
http://www.microsoft.com/germany/windowsce/ 
 

CP/M at one time was a very popular operating system. In fact, QD-DOS (which became MS-DOS) was a cheap imitation of CP/M. CP/M, which later became DR-DOS, and then passed through Novell to Caldera to become OpenDOS, is perhaps more interesting because of its relationship to Microsoft, and its creator, Gary Kildall, who lost the bid to provide an OS for IBM's first PC to Microsoft.  
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/CPM-faq/faq.html  

Caldera DR-DOS Open DOS 7.02  
http://www.caldera.com/dos  
     PC Professional:  
     http://www.zdplanet.de/produkte/artikel/sw/9805/os09-wf.htm  

MS-DOS 
http://www.myos.com/dos.shtml  

Windows 3.1, CE, 95 & NT 
http://www.winuser.com  
     Windows NT 
     http://www.windows-nt.com  

OS/2 
http://www.musthave.com  

Amiga OS 
http://www.PureAmiga.co.uk  

MacOS 
http://www.MacOS8.com  

Newton OS 
http://www.panix.com/~clay/newton/  

Magic Cap, powers such devices as the Sony MagicLink and Motorola Envoy 
http://members.aol.com/darkdan/DDDomain.html  

NeXTStep & OPENSTEP 
http://www.rhapsody.net  
     GNUstep, based on the original OpenStep specification provided by NeXT, Inc. (now Apple)  
     http://www.nmr.embl-heidelberg.de/GNUstep/  
          The Object Farm  
          http://www.objectfarm.org/  
     Berliner NeXT Usergroup    
     http://www.beng.org    

Rhapsody   
http://www.rhapsody.net  
http://www.apple.com/macos/rhapsody/   
     How Rhapsody emmerged from the Apple MacOS and NeXT OPENSTEP platforms 
     http://www.objectfarm.org/TheMerger/  
     PC Professional:  
     http://www.zdplanet.de/produkte/artikel/sw/9805/os12-wf.htm  
 

BeOS, a preemptive multitasking, symmetric multiprocessing, object-oriented, real-time OS for Pentium and PowerPC developed by Jean-Louis Gassée, an ex-Apple man.  
http://www.beeurope.com/  
http://www.beos.com  

SAP's R/3, a client/server-based OS integrating database and other components  
http://www.sap.com/rel45/index.htm  

GEOS, an alternative GUI-driven operating system that is the basis for a number of different computers and hardware devices 
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jbearden/geoindex.htm  

VMS, by Digital, supports two hardware platforms: VAX and Alpha 
http://www.hhs.dk/vms/  

Siemens' BS2000  
http://www.siemensnixdorf.com/servers/bs2osd/osdbc_de.htm  
  

Books on Operating Systems Theory   
http://www.netshop.com.au/bookshop/technical/opsys.htm   
   
Books on OSs by Andrew Tanenbaum  
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/