Andrew S. Tanenbaum Receives ACM Software System Award

You apparently can't follow a chain of comments in a thread nor understand what is written down. My comment pointing out yours is here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40784174

> And it's telling that responding to the question of why an OS should do these things, you finding a definition of an OS and asserting (falsely, I might add) that transparent distributed systems and only those meet that definition.

Again, you have not read/understood what has been written down nor the sources to which i linked to elaborate my points. And also i never said "that transparent distributed systems and only those meet that definition". In my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766810 i explicitly say "an OS is supposed to do viz. provide a uniform interface and transparent access to various Compute, Storage and Network resources wherever they might be." and then link to the distributed OS Wikipedia page for further details. If you had cared to even read that page you would have understood the key "Design Considerations" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_operating_system#D...) driving the approach. It is the "User Experience" that makes a distributed OS approach so compelling; though its realization can be more complex/difficult compared to other approaches w.r.t. certain parameters eg. Scaling.

To summarize, i would advise you to read up on Distributed OS research before making silly blanket claims which can be easily disproved. Just because today the Cloud model has established itself as the industry standard doesn't mean that is the correct approach. You have to know both sides before you can argue for/against.

That is precisely the point; when something is referred to in a chain you have to look at where and not necessarily in front of your nose; it's not that complicated.

> That was certainly the implication if you use that to answer the question, why must the OS do that.

No, most certainly it is not when you are explicitly being pointed to resources where more details can be found. You are expected to do some self-study and not necessarily spoon fed when it comes to absolute basics like "why is a OS needed?".

> You do understand how "The OS must do it because that's how I define the OS" does not actually say anything, right? Even if that is the definition of the OS (which it isn't), it just shifts the question to "why should the OS be defined that way?"

You are either being intentionally obtuse or really are. The motivation for an OS is buried in its definition; this is CS101 and not something deep which you seem to think it is and i even linked you to the necessary definitions and mentioned terms like "Transparency, Resource Management, User Experience, etc." to highlight the essentials.

At this point i am can only conclude that you are repeating the same vague statements (they are not even an argument) over and over again without providing an iota of hard data (which i have done) because you really have no clue.