We are sure that Friend is going to make a powerful impact as it is being inserted as part of the internet structure itself.

To us, the Blockchain is a shared storage medium that frees us from hardware boundaries. It allows us to secure user accounts and give these users a new level of ownership of their new network based computing environment. FriendUP will closely resemble an expansive, permanent and autonomous operating system foundation. And as a contribution to all Dapp developers currently building fantastic new Blockchain based projects, we think it will really make a difference.

Our mission to create a new OS paradigm will take years to fully manifest, but we’re confident that we will complete this work. As can be seen from the code that has already been written — we are well on our way towards our goal.

In these early days, we are forming an Open Source Team structure. The structure will place project participants into certain roles for managing and organizing our development effort. It is something that every project needs. All in all, Friend is a project which concerns itself with freedom. The project structure is going to be kept agile and dynamic, but with a firm focus on our road map.

The vision of Friend was formed over many years. It has deep roots all the way back to Thoth, an OS that was created at the University of Waterloo and the University of Cambridge ca. 1976. This system is the great grandfather of Friend. Here is an excerpt from a document describing this system, which was developed in a time when operating system creativity was at an all time high;

There are several successful operating systems for mini-computers written in high level languages and the time is now ripe for the development of portable systems for such machines. The system described … is primarily designed to provide a friendly interactive multiprocessing environment for a single user. From this point of view, substantial parts of the system are completely machine independent. These include, for instance, the filing system, the command language, text editors, overlaying facilities and inter-process communication primitives.

- TRIPOS, SOFTWARE-PRACTICE AND EXPERIENCE, VOL. 9, 513–526, 1979

Our work really started back in the mid 2000s, when a bunch of developers broke out of the AROS project to start building something revolutionary (the Anubis project). Since 2014, we have finally come so far that the base platform is usable and is being adopted by both users and new developers. It is time for a distributed computing architecture that improves on the ideas of Unix and that fulfills the promise that engineers saw in Network Computing.