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About 6 months ago, I had a really great idea that will never happen if left up to me. I'm lazy. So I present this idea here hoping that someone will pick it up and run with it.

The idea was simply this: There are times when you want the convenience of a iPhone or tablet type device. Other times a net book is the smallest device you would want. Other things might require a full sized laptop and still others might require the resources and graphic processing power of a full blown desktop.

It occurred to me that I'd rather have one solid state hard drive that could be my system drive which when plugged into ANY of these platforms could boot up and become "My Computer". The idea came to me when I was experimenting with various linux disrtros. I had one that was installed to an external HD and could be used to boot 2 different PCs with different configurations. Now, this didn't last long. After booting the second device a couple of times, I was no longer able to boot the first device. But that's when I got the idea; what if the OS and hardware bios were designed to accommodate this?

First of all, you would have to have a bios that can poll and offer up information about its installed hardware in a standardized fashion. Secondly, you would have to have an OS that can scale itself to work within what resources are available. "Oh, I'm in a tablet? The I run the simple graphics driver." v.s. "We have full Direct X 11? Cool!!! I can load the maxi-DirectX driver."

So that's essentially it: one OS that you carry around on a solid state memory device or a flash drive, It understands the info the bios is presenting about resources, and plugs itself into the available hardware. The bios would present something like an abstraction layer to the OS because it would be accommodating all variations between different graphics cards and so on. The OS would only be concerned with what subset of graphic features are available now.

An advanced variation of this might be complete virtualization of the processor and graphics functions. I mean, can you imagine a scenario where the architecture of your processor is an image file on your hard drive? Ultimately, this could lead to windows and mac and linux and hundreds of other OSs being able to run on the same hardware. Of course the advantage to the user is a seamless experience with his OS no matter what its running on.

You could do your work on whatever sized computer suited your needs at that time, or even a boot up a computer at the public library with your drive, but still be able to return home, connect your drive and pick up exactly where you left off.

Well anyways, that my idea. While unlikely, I think its the direction we should be going in. And if you invent it, I only want a 10% stake in it for suggesting the idea.

That's pretty much what OSes, programming libraries, runtime libraries, compilers all already do. If you want to unify hardware more, I guess you could try to abstract it some more but I think computer need much less abstraction and much simpler interfaces. Stuff's way too complicated these days. Take me back to ROM-based BASIC.

I'd like to see an OS that anybody can explore and compile parts of and know what's actually going on.

Check out LFS it's a fracking joke. (It's crazy cool, don't get me wrong, but from an end-user perspective, it's insane).

We all live in the same looking skyscraper when we could all be living in awesome bespoke villas.

I believe we call that a Tablet... you take it here, there, everywhere and ok look it even works at home...

Happy with my Surface 2 and getting my Surface Pro 2 very soon, just waiting for it to ship!

But you mean Via USB? ThunderBolt? E-Sata? a while ago there were distributions of 'modified' XP and possibly later editions of windows that were run from a USB device... have a look for that also Linux has Live Disk options when you stick it in...

Or did I miss something here?

Saying the underlying hardware being embedded in the Data will ultimately lead to errors, imagine your data was corrupted for whatever reason and you were not able to boot up... dang... and the extended usage of the drive in high access stress would wear its chips down soon...

In an ideal world this SYSTEM ON A STICK is something I think they are already working on Embedding Into The Human Body... but I sort of get where you are going with this, it would bring quite a few things down, but theft aside, what if you lost it? encryption? what if you forgot your own encryption key?

A lot to think about this but you may be onto something here... just not sure now would be the time to introduce something like this ^^

Here is an idea, if you want to see if this is a novel idea, throw the idea up on a crowd funding site and you will see if it flies or erm goes back to the drawing board...

Funnies aside we now have 256GB ~ or at least I am aware of 128GB SD Cards, which can only say one thing, it should be possible...

@Mrvalentine, Regarding tablets, I could not disagree more. I'm never going to be able to do the kind of work I do, on a tablet. Never. Most of it is very very very processor intensive. Besides, I need a full keyboard and mouse.

However there are occasions I can haply get by on a netbook - when I'm just browsing and doing my email. The point would be having all those experiences tied to one data storage device and having it local, not somewhere "in the cloud".

I'm only suggesting one possible solution with my very limited knowledge of hardware. I just think partial or even total virtualization could be really cool. Especially when you consider processing resources could be allocated differently for different OSs or applications according to need. For example, remember when mpeg2 decoding acceleration was first brought into graphics cards? Well I think about that when I'm using my Mac to do video editing. Mpeg2 decoding is irrelevant to me now but other types of encoding and decoding are vital. Codecs that weren't invented when my mac was being designed. What if my editing system could be updated with hardware acceleration to support new codecs in the graphics card?

I don't know... I agree its probably not the time for such an investment. Its just an idea that I think needs to be shared. Its a vision of what could be.

Regarding running XP from an external drive, That is similar in the end result because it acts like you booted from the external dev. Yes, you can load up your user files from an external device but I'm fairly certain you aren't really booting into your own OS. The OS is still on the system drive. Besides that would tie you to only windows XP devices.

I think if any of these live DVD distros of linux could be redisigned to load more quickly, they certainly would be a possibility. That is in essence what I'm looking for.

I may have to try a live dvd distro installed to an external ssd drive and see what happens.

Before I read your post I have to get off my chest how annoying it is when people say "This is the future of X". New ideas are great but I don't understand this way of thinking that anything new must replace everything that came before it, because that's not reality. It's like when people say, "VR is the future of gaming!", not really, it's a new option, that's all.

What you are suggesting sounds a lot like what Canonical are doing with Ubuntu. Have a listen to this when you have an hour to spare:

yeah.. everybody generally seems to be slowly but surely moving slowly towards an ambiguous hardware model, which is a good thing and is/was definitely needed.

Obviously when software has a high dependency upon hardware it becomes locked to that particular foot print. In the old 8/16bits days, programs were almost entirely hardware dependent. Meaning they control display, sound, input->output etc at a hardware level. This model is viable when the host platform is a uniform collection of bits, but not today.

Moving software between architectures has always been one of those topics quickly thrown into the too hard basket. Certainly back in early 80's through to mid 90's there's more than a few good reasons for that. But now, we live is world of abstraction layers, so there's no need for every day software to hit hardware anymore. But as long as we still compile natively to a host processor (with different OS patterns) the result is much the same. The software is locked at the hip.

The solution is somewhat obvious, build software for virtual architectures rather than physical ones. Which isn't even remotely new today since the raw concept is in use all around us. I remember hearing of this stuff back in the early 1990's with TAOS operating system and basically thinking what are they smoking. It was a step too far for most people. But not today.

Well, if you have not seen the Surface, then you are missing out... Surface Pro and even RT are pretty powerful...

Surface 2 has 72 GPU cores (as do some other tablets using this...

Surface Pro 2 I cannot say anything for yet but it has Intel 4th gen Haskell which if you do some web searching you will see can play BF3 and Skyrim...

So yeah, tablets are powerful already...

My Surface 2 is actually quad core+1 lol

That can be done with an FPGA. Companies are just starting to come out with FPGA pci cards and such.

@Libervutro, Sorry if I sounded like I was dictating the future or being disrespectful to all that's gone before.

To a large extent, I agree with your sentiments. I see the value of standardization and how it has helped through the years and yes I'm suggesting throwing it away - But its in favor of a new larger standardization that would go much further so that ANYONE can write programs for it and anyone can build hardware for it. while still allowing for flavors and various configurations and various OSs.

It stems from a question I asked myself a while ago. I thought, what if I was Steve Jobs? What if I had deep pockets and software hardware know-how and didn't care about anybody else but myself? What kind of system would I want? Because the reality is, what I want may be unlikely but all of the reasons why its unlikely are bad reasons. The past isn't a good reason to not build the future.

Anyhow, I just wanted to say thanks for that link. It looks like someone at the heart of that linux distro - Ubuntu Sausy Salamander is looking for a way to reach the same goals with a dock-able device.

@MrValentine, I think tablets are great, But they are just not a form-factor for me. To me they will always remain toys or communication devices for extremely limited use. I don't really care how many processors they squeeze into the thing, its just not ever going to be my main computer.

@Kevin Picone... Oh well, the laughs on me. I thought I invented the idea! I didn't realize people have been talking about this all along. Well, I can still be a booster for the idea.