 So I've been thinking (boom). Not about the exam on Monday, no way that would happen. I've been thinking about how quite a few people live out of a USB memory stick/drive/key/dongle/whatever, especially at uni. Some people do it because they don't have a laptop and use a combination of lab and home computers. Some people do it even though they do have a laptop. For example me. To the point where I want to get a fancy shmancy memory card thingy that can still be used with USB, so I don't have an 8gb stick hanging off the side of my laptop all the time.
Money sinks aside, I see this sort of portable storage playing a big role in the near future of computing. It already is, you say? Yes, well, that's what tipped me off. But seriously, it's pretty limited at the moment. Most people don't put that many programs on their USB whatchamacallits. The reason for this, from what I've seen, is that a lot of programs just don't handle it very well. E.g. they use the registry (eww) or store stuff in your user or system directories that don't move when the program does. There's been some effort to sort this out, and half-assed operating system support for this kind of thing, but I ignored it all because it would take per-program effort. It seems to me the problem is being solved at the wrong level entirely.
The clean solution is to have an operating system on your USB, along with your user profile and so on, as a portable OS. Details after the break.
The vision I have is not a full blown operating system. It should just provide a consistent running environment for any programs you've got (using your memory stick as a hard drive), a nice GUI and file browser (which treats any host computer storage as portable storage) and kind of pass-through drivers for sound and networking and so on. It should not attempt to talk to all the hardware directly, because that way lies madness. Madness in the form of configuring the network every time you switch computer, not to mention no one will give you that kind of access. The host computer needs to provide some kind of hardware abstraction layer to save us from this madness. Unless this idea really catches on, that layer will be another operating system. Ideally, all operating systems would separate the hardware stuff from the GUI nicely, and allow you to boot the second half from portable media, but that's not about to happen. Actually I think linux is pretty separated, but I haven't looked at how it works. In any case, this should not require emulation. Pretty much any computer out there is x86 these days (no I don't care about your eee pc) so the only thing you've got to worry about to get both the applications and OS code running native is 32/64 bit. The portable OS should be able to abstract away any differences in underlying operating system. Tall order I know.
Now, to pull this off to a degree that I would find cool would be a serious software engineering feat. But think about what it would mean. You stroll up to a random computer, plug in your stick and log in. You're then met with your familiar old desktop, cluttered with 300 icons you never use. Your backdrop is your favourite picture that everyone else thinks is gay. You don't have to go through the annoying "where do the keep word on this thing" and "they don't have my favourite web browser here" moments, because you brought it all with you, and it's all just how you like it. You're home!
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