Has anyone in here ever tried used or tried I wanting to see if anyone had the cd that had the source code
Syllable’s website has been nonresponsive for nearly 3 years, and there hasn’t been any work on it for about 8 years.
Maybe see if you can find the site on the Wayback Machine?
I used AtheOS for some time before it got forked into Syllable…
Syllable releases are available at:
I used AtheOS and Syllable. The latter was kind of okay to start with, then Vanders, the guy who started the fork, left and I didn’t really like the direction after that. The main developer wanted to implement Rebol on top of the OS and it just didn’t work for me. They also tried to create a version of Linux at one point called Syllable Server - I never really understood that.
As for the OS in general… The API was like BeOS, except when it wasn’t. The UI was kind of okayish in Syllable, but AtheOS was more crude. It never really seemed “done”.
The one you want to find though is Cosmoe - that was Syllable/AtheOS forked again and the guy doing it (Bill someone) was trying to converge the then OpenBeOS API with the Syllable API to make an OS that was running on top of a modifies Unix Kernel (I forget which one - maybe BSD, maybe a Linux) and using the Syllable App server with BeOS style API. That one is worth looking in to.
Edit: and here is some source: https://github.com/D-os/cosmoe
I used Syllable lot of years ago. Quite impressive, for having a so small core team.
It’s a shame that the alt-OSs movement, which was quite sparkling in the 90s/00s is somewhat disappeared (at least in the desktop universe). Haiku is perhaps the last OS project still alive?
(I don’t consider ReactOS, here)
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There are other OS projects that are still alive:
Haiku is probably most advanced one even if comparing to ReactOS.
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Not to forget MorphOS and AmigaOS which both manage to sell enough copies to have paid developers,
Redox OS from the “let’s (re)write it in Rust” department, Arca Noae which continues to update and improve OS/2, Risc OS which is now open source and runs on the Raspberry Pi and other ARM hardware.
So, quite a lot of systems to pick from these days, possibly more than in the 90s/00s in fact.
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I’m not really a big fan of ReactOs but I see no reason to leave it out of a current alternative OS list. It is still being developed and seems to have a quite active community
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And AROS as well, an open source implementation of AmigaOS. Although I don’t seem to get the “Amiga way” at all (it nearly always does exactly the opposite of what I expect) I’ve tried both MorphOS and AROS and they both did seem quite impressive at first look. MorphOS runs much faster on my G4 Mac Mini than any OSX did.
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Yes, it is. But I’m not considering here those reimplementations like AROS and ReactOS but “reimaginations” following new concept designs. Ok, Haiku started as BeOS reimplementation, ofc, but now is much more than that.
Ah, and ofc we have TempleOS 
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I’m not forgetting AROS but it was in X512’s list already.
AROS is a lot more different from AmigaOS than Haiku is different from BeOS, in fact. So maybe you should have a closer look? In general, each system here either tries to bring the ideas of another one further, or on the contrary, explore something completely new. I’d tend to say the first approach is more likely to work (but then again, I’d not be working on Haiku if I didn’t think so). Syllable is a fork of Atheos which itself was inspired by a mix of BeOS and AmigaOS, for example. SkyOS was somewhat inspired by Syllable as well, and used a filesystem similar to BFS.
Also if we start looking at the more strange ones there is KnightOS for TI calculators, Contiki which brings IPv6 to the Commodore 64 and various other 8 and 16bit systems and manages to run a VNC server on a system with less than a kilobyte of RAM, SymbOS which runs on z80 based computers, NitrOS/9 for the Tandy CoCo and other 6809-based 8bit systems, …
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SkyOS - I remember that! It was kind of okay and the UI was very nice, but under the hood it was a bit “held together by magic” was the impression I got. I used it, and I used to have a fully registered copy. But it vanished from the Net when the project stagnated… much like AtheOS and later Syllable to a certain extent.
Did have a paid version for SkyOS back then, even did some porting on it 
http://users.skynet.be/Begasus/images/skyos/sky.htm
https://www.flickr.com/photos/begasus/1007216903/
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Looking through some of the alternative operating systems presented here, Menuet OS also comes to my mind:
Perhaps an interesting OS for someone deeply interested in Assembly. 
Sorry, I have to admit I didn’t read the complete thread 
Yeah, me too. SkyOS was quite impressive, especially considering it was done by one guy alone. But I think it also serves as an example what happens when you try to do everything on your own and don’t open up development to a community.
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KolibriOS (already mentionned above) is a fork of Menuet, I think more welcoming to contributors.
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I’ve run KolibriOS in a VM a couple of times. It’s interesting to see just how much the developers managed to cram into an OS, and keep it under 100MB and able to work in tight RAM constraints (IIRC KolibriOS can boot on as little as 8MB RAM).
Yeah no kidding, especially since Menuet64 is closed source.