The man who lead the development of an operating system project at Microsoft other than Windows has decided to leave the company after 16 years. James Larus, who was a principle researcher at Microsoft Research, will become the new dean of computer science at Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne in Switzerland starting in October.
ZDNet reports that Larus, who joined Microsoft in 1988, was the leader behind the Singularity OS project, which was based on managed code and was created from scratch. The OS started as a research project in 2003 but was never used in a commercial product. Microsoft stopped development on the OS in 2008 but decided to make the work on the Singularity OS available for download for academic, non-commercial projects. Larus later helped to lead Microsoft's eXtreme Computing Group, which developed cloud-based hardware and software products.
Although the Singularity OS is no more, ZDNet.com reports that many other operating systems at Microsoft were directly or indirectly influenced by Singularity. One of them is Midori, which is still in development at Microsoft, even though the company won't officially talk about it. Midori could still be used inside some kind of Microsoft commercial product, but at the moment there's no word on when that might happen.
Source: ZDNet.com | Image via Microsoft
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