Only very very loosely, so on balance, I would have to say "no".
The point of Taos was not network transparency, or clusters, or any of that.
The USP of Taos was platform-neutral binaries, translated on the fly to native format as they were loaded from disk. Full native performance on every platform from a single binary file, with the loader/translator embedded into the OS itself.
[Aside:
It ended up very small compared to native OSes so it could be used as a runtime as well. It was so efficient that it could convert Java bytecode to its own format and convert that to native code and still outperform the JVM... for a while.
]
Something akin to Java, but the JVM is an addon that you install on a different OS, and there's no "native" OS*. Apps aren't native and don't look or feel like native.
Plan 9 has nothing like this; Plan 9 is UNIX 2.0 with networking and GUI right there in the kernel. Binaries are written in C and compiled to the native CPU; no portability.
Amoeba OS I've never seen but I think it was much the same.
Inferno is Plan 9 2.0, which is to say, it is UNIX 3.0. C is banished, native binaries are banished. A runtime VM, Dis, is embedded in the kernel. Binaries are written in Limbo and compiled to Dis. The same binary runs everywhere, like Taos, but it's not translated as such: there is a bytecode interpreter at a low level.
[Aside #2:
It ended up very small compared to native OSes so it could be used as a runtime as well. It was so efficient that it was competitive with the JVM, and so was offered as a rival, but still with its own format that could outperform the JVM... for a while.
]
[Aside #3:
Note the very similar asides 1 & 2. That's deliberate. Both fell into the same trap. Both failed and I think this was a contributing factor.
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[Aside #4:
Java fell into the same trap and failed to compete with Javascript embedded right into the HTML renderer itself.
]
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* Yes I know about SavaJE etc. Not directly relevant, and all flopped.
Thanks for the details. It's interesting to know the differences between them. Yes, it looks like Inferno is the closes thing to Taos. My point was that there was a lot of interesting research operating systems that explored ideas in that direction (heterogeneity, distribution, networking, etc). But Taos seems super interesting. In what language is it written?
I do not know for sure, but my impression is that v1 was mostly hand-coded assembler for the low-level stuff, while v2 replaced quite a lot of that with C.
True, but treating a network as a single computer is not something we can easily do even now. You can't easily run Firefox, Slack, LibreOffice, and Thunderbird on a desktop cluster (Think a couple NUC boards tied together) without lots of installation and configuration (and network trickery to fool X clients).
Having said that, this seems like a natural evolutionary path for the Boxes OS.
I’d love to see a demo of it running, in particular the network transparency part.