Vortex - Now and Then

I’m proud to say that I have some concepts that will work nice for the Vortex Engine.

Contact has been made with PNSoftware, vendor or the ancient MyOS “Desktop Environment.” Peter Nightingale, owner of PN Software, has given rights Vectec to produce software under the MyOS name with a very loose licence agreement.

The reason to emulate MyOS is clear. It’s already got a GUI to work from. Having Prior art makes it easy to work with. None of the orginal code will make it in the Vortex Engine. To be clear, Vortex refers to the engine that runs the MyOS interface. Unline earlier versions, Vortex is going back to the orginal idea of running from scripts. Using and extending Lua is key to this. I also plan on incorperating my intraprocess messenger.

But why call it MyOS?
Vortex has traditionally been kind of a test platform for new technologies. Indeed, the last functioning version of Vortex was 0.5, which did not feature any support for GUIs, it allowed for up to 5 running processes. This was a breakthrough at the time. Let me take this chance to summarize the history of Vortex:

History of Vortex

0.3: Written in QBasic, it featured a GUI, and “Twister Mail”. It also has an admit panel and a half implemented program registry to easily launch programs from. The GUI was a mix of graphical and text dos, and was very inflexible. Menus were navigated by a keyboard. Used star echoing password for multiuser support, a first in the Vortex/MyOS battle.

0.5: First to support multiple processes running. It used a custom language called ‘Vertex.’

0.6: Attempted to extend Vertex into a graphical interface. Attempting to use UGL overloaded the compiler, and support, and the QBasic language was abandoned.

VParse: Moving to C++, it extended Vertex to Vertex2, which was incompatible with Vertex (executions in 0.5/0.6 resulted in the program closing). Written for Linux, it could be ported to Win32 fairly easily. This is the last program to support Vertex2.

0.7: THis was a Linux Only release that didn’t actually do anything. I started work on the backend, but there was no actual programs or anything here.

0.8: A graphical version of Vortex written in Win32. It supported pre-compiled C/C++ code into DLL form. Support for this was dropped promptly.

0.8 marked the last offical release of Vortex, 2 years ago this month. Since then, a lot of knowledge has been gained, and the Project Deviation has been created. Hopefully I can make a new addition soon!