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The Singularity research project began with the idea of building more dependable software. Hunt, who specializes in operating-system development, and Larus, an expert in tools and programming languages, realized that to accomplish this, they would need better tools and a better system architecture.
The status quo that confronted them was the decades-long tradition of designing operating systems and development tools. Contemporary operating systems—including Microsoft Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and UNIX—all trace their lineage back to an operating system called Multics that originated in the mid-1960s. As a result, the researchers reasoned, current systems still are being designed using criteria from 40 years ago, when the world of computing looked much different than it does today.
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http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/singularity.aspx