[SkyOS](https://archiveos.org/skyos/) was a proprietary, graphical desktop operating system created by Robert Szeleney in 1996 as a small bootloader and continued until it was finally abandoned in 2009. # Notability I followed the development of the OS for years as an interesting alternative OS. I have a SkyOS license which differs from the public beta key. Pretty sure that means I paid for it. The SkyFS file system was based on [[Haiku]]'s [[BSD License]]d [[OpenBFS]], a reimplementation of [[BeOS]]'s [[BFS]]. # History > Development started in 1996 with the first version released in December 1997. Up until version 4.x the OS was freely available. Starting with beta development of SkyOS 5 in 2003, users were required to pay US$30 to get access to beta releases. SkyOS adapted new filesystem SkyFS based on OpenBFS in 2004 and its graphics subsystem was improved in 2006 with support for desktop compositing including double buffering and transparency. The OS also moved to ELF binaries then. The last beta build 6947 was released in August 2008 and there was no status update for several months. It seems that driver development was a major blocker for a general purpose OS intended for x86 and the developer attempted to replace his own kernel with another open source one but apparently gave up the attempt and subsequently abandoned the project instead. This is an important lesson for any new OS, supporting a wide variety of specialty hardware is a massive undertaking best reserved for corporations with millions of dollars to spare. # References ```cardlink url: https://youtu.be/4LOCyT12X0Y title: "SkyOS - a Non-Linux ’90s Operating System (Overview & Demo)" description: "Support the channel on Patreon to get early access to these videos!https://patreon.com/MichaelMJDSometime ago I stumbled upon SkyOS - an OS created from scra..." host: youtu.be favicon: https://www.youtube.com/s/desktop/d6f8896a/img/favicon_32x32.png image: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4LOCyT12X0Y/maxresdefault.jpg ```