GCOE G2 is a compact, portable, multitasking PC environment with an attractive windowing graphical front end. GCOE was started in late 1998 by 13 year old Shea Rial as an attempt to learn as much as possible about the internal architecture of an operating system by writing one of his own. Not knowing any better, he began writing it in the antiquated Microsoft QuickBasic 7.1 programming language.

Starting completely from scratch, with less then 2 years of programming experience, he had a working multitasking GUI based windowing prototype completed in less then 7 months. Only the first in a series of prototypes, he went on to create 6 full rewrites of the kernel. With each of the prototypes, he perfected the concepts and

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ideas that would be implemented and refined in the next version. 2 years after starting the project, he released version 1.0 of the GCOE kernel to the general public.

GCOE G2 represents a full rewrite of the 1.0 kernel. More efficient, more robust, and more compact, the number of lines of code in G2 has been shortened to nearly half of the original, while still offering many additional features. Optimized for efficiency, G2 averages over 2000% faster then the 1.0 version of the kernel, according to independent test results. Remarkably, the entire G2 kernel only uses 130k from the base 640k of memory.

Technically, GCOE G2 is not an operating system because it is initialized by DOS, FreeDOS, or DR-DOS and uses calls to the underlying DOS layer to access the filesystem. However, Windows 3.1, 95, and 98 also used similar techniques in interfacing with DOS, but where called Operating Systems. What to call it? You make the choice.

I recently was able to talk to the developer and ask him a few questions. I was given permission to include his statements on this page.