WebOS is getting popular

Providing common set of OS services to wide area applications, including mechanisms for resource discovery, a global namespace, remote process execution, resource management, authentication, and security, - on a single machine, application developers can rely on the local operating system to provide these abstractions. In the wide area, however, application developers are forced to build these abstractions themselves or to do without. This ad-hoc approach wastes programmer effort and system resources. To address these problems, WebOS provided basic operating systems services needed to build applications that are geographically distributed, highly available, incrementally scalable, and dynamically reconfiguring.

In a way the term WebOS is a misnomer, because it doesn’t mean a ‘real’ Operating System in the traditional sense - like Linux or Windows. A better term is probably ‘Web Desktop’, because it at least moves the "I already have an OS, why do I need another one?" argument out of the way.

WebOS began at the University of California, Berkeley in 1996 as part of the Network of Workstations project. It was completed in 1998 with the NOW finale. Related efforts continue by project members at Duke University (ISSG), the University of Texas at Austin (Beyond Browsers), and the University of Washington. In addition, all three universities were collaborating on the Active Names work that grew out of WebOS.

WebOS acquired WebOS.org, which was created by a young Swedish programmer, Fredrik Malmer, who had created the first online desktop environment. Soon after, some of the top DHTML and Javascript programmers in the world such as Erik Arvidsson of WebFx fame, Dan Steinman, creator of the Dynamic Duo Cross-browser DHTML API, joined WebOS. WebOS competed with another start up, Desktop.com, which was aimed more at the consumer market. WebOS was covered by many media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, financial Times, LA Times, Power lunch on CNBC, Fox News and CNN and helped spread the WebOS meme further. The WebOS meme gained popularity in 1999 when a much touted start up, WebOS Inc. (at first know as MyWebOS), was founded by Berkeley grad Shervin Pishevar and Emory grad Drew Morris. WebOS licensed the WebOS technologies from Duke University and University of Texas (Austin) and recruited Dr. Amin Vahdat, Professor of Computer Science at Duke, who had pioneered the WebOS technologies at University of California at Berkeley where he got his PhD on his WebOS research.