One problem with building things using state-of-the-art techniques is that sometimes those that look like they will be “the next big thing” turn out to be dead ends. Next thing you know, that hot new part or piece of software is hard to get or unmaintained. This is especially true if you are building something with a long life span. A case in point is the New York City subway system. Back in the 1990s the transit authority decided to adopt IBM’s new OS/2 operating system. Why not? It was robust and we used to always say “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.”

There was one problem. OS/2 was completely eclipsed by other operating systems, notably Windows and — mostly — has sunk from the public view. [Andrew Egan’s] post covers just how the conversion to a card-based system pushed OS/2 underground all over the Big Apple, and it is an interesting read.

The choice of OS/2 might seem odd today. However, you have to remember the operating system landscape back then. Unix wasn’t very commercial, for the most part, and the commercial versions like Xenix and SCO were often encumbered with odd and changing licensing arrangements. MSDOS was hardly suitable for any sort of reliable system, with a patchwork of hacks to get more memory, and multitasking including early versions of Windows which were little more than shells over MSDOS.

It’s hard to know whether to pronounce software infrastructure company Wind River as wind (as in eaten too many beans, that thing that makes sails billow out) or wind (as in snakey, twisty) river.

It looks like its wind as in breezy mistrals on this link, so let’s go with that.

Whether it be winding or breezy, the company has this month updated its Wind River Linux with a release focused on ease of adoption of containers in embedded systems.

How do you make containers adoption easier? We’re glad you asked.

It’s all about offering pre-built containers, tools and documentation as well as support for frameworks such as Docker and Kubernetes.

Following the US government trade ban last month, Huawei lost business ties with several American companies, including Google, dealing a huge blow to its Android smartphone business. The Chinese phonemaker is building an Android-based operating system of its own now. However, building an OS from the scratch is by no means an easy task. While it continues working on its OS, supposedly called HongMeng OS in China, the company is also exploring other options, in case it has to completely forego Android.

There aren’t many options out there, but Huawei still seems to have zeroed in on one of them. A report from Russia suggests that the Chinese company may make Aurora OS its Android alternative. Aurora OS is a Russian-made mobile OS based on the open-source Sailfish OS Linux distribution developed by Finnish company Jolla.

Android is dominating the mobile and there are no doubts regarding this. According to statistics, Android has a share of 75%, iOS has a share of 22% and remaining operating systems share the rest. We want to talk about these “remaining operating systems” which you probably have never heard of and you will perhaps want to have on your next phone.