Web operating system

In metacomputing, WebOS and Web operating system are terms that describe network services for internet scale distributed computing, as in the WebOS Project at UC Berkeley, and the WOS Project. In both cases the scale of the web operating system extends across the internet, like the web.

However, the terms WebOS and Web operating system have been employed more broadly and with far greater popularity in the context of "the web as in HTTP", and for many meanings ranging from singular systems to collections of systems. In April 2002, Tim O'Reilly spoke of "the emergent Internet operating system" as an open collection of Web services.

Common to uses for collections of systems, a Web operating system is distinct from Internet operating systems in that it is independent of the traditional individual computer operating system. This conception of the system reflects an evolution of research in the field of operating systems into the increasingly minimized (for example, TinyOS and Exokernel) and distributed (for example, Inferno), and for distributed systems increasingly defined in terms of the specification of their network protocols more than their implementations (for example, Plan9's 9P).