Click here for the original article. And check out the genius's website. My description of NSBIOS is found at the end of the article.

By Grant Butler

New Australian software house Novasoft Technology has issued a challenge to Microsoft and the rest of the global computing establishment, releasing a new operating system designed for the internet.

The operating system is called NSBIOS (see www.nsbios.com) and was written over three years by Mr Ashod Apakian, a self-taught 22-year-old computer programmer.

Its first users include a group of financial institutions such as ANZ Bank, Bankers Trust, Commonwealth Bank, Macquarie Bank and Midlands Bank, which have been using the system on a free trial basis to trade foreign exchange options over the internet.

The trading application, called SFINX, runs on NSBIOS and allows financial institutions to trade currency options in real-time using computers rather than open voice phone lines or "squawk boxes".

"This system is being offered as an alternative to the existing broker market," said Mr David Bavin, director of Macquarie Bank's foreign exchange division and a SFINX advocate.

The SFINX system cut trading costs by about 80 per cent and was "fairer" because all participants saw prices simultaneously, he said.

Asked his opinion of Novasoft, Mr Bavin replied: "From talking to the young computer bloke, Ashod, I think he's a genius. I think they're a young Australian company to be encouraged."

However, because the system makes traditional voice brokers redundant, some banks, particularly larger institutions that have historically been favoured by the brokers, have stopped using it.

"The brokers appear to have exerted some back-room pressure on the banks," Mr Steve Duchen, director of Novasoft, said. He added that Novasoft was seeking financial backing to begin marketing the system to international currency-trading groups.

According to Mr Duchen, NSBIOS cost around $750,000 to develop. The money was provided by a small group of private, Australian investors, he said.

The key benefit of the new operating system was speed.

NSBIOS is written in the low-level Assembler programming language and is only 80 kilobytes in size. The current version of NSBIOS has been written for 32-bit Intel processors, such as the Pentium family. However, Mr Apakian said it could be modified and run on other hardware platforms.

According to Mr Apakian, NSBIOS is 250 times faster than Java and comes with development tools making it suitable for professionals who want to create real-time, interactive applications such as SFINX.

These might include voice and video conferencing over conventional phone lines, home shopping sites and high-speed computer gaming environments, he said.

While for now writing task-specific applications such as SFINX brings in bread-and-butter revenue for Novasoft, the company's dream is nothing less than redefining the internet, which it argues is too slow and based on outmoded technology.

And while NSBIOS is designed for use in large, distributed networks including the internet, it is not based on conventional internet protocols such as TCP/IP.

Therefore applications written to NSBIOS in Novasoft's Information eXchange Language (IXL) cannot be seen through standard web browsers, for instance. However, electronic mail and other traffic can be exchanged between computers running on NSBIOS and computers using other operating systems, including Windows, according to Mr Apakian.

"Everyone's trying to be backwards-compatible," said Mr Apakian. "But that's the gamble we took. We thought 'stuff it', we won't be compatible but we'll get speeds no-one has ever dreamt of."

Mr Apakian, who said he had been programming since the age of 10, added: "I looked at the internet a long time ago and thought, if everyone's going to continue like this, it's always going to be slow and difficult to use. I had to start from scratch."

The company hopes to expand in two directions. First, to attempt to find customers for the SFINX and other task-specific applications, including network computing installations.

Second, Novasoft wants to launch what it calls the "SuperNet", a new network with room for 400 trillion addressable users and devices based on NSBIOS -- a new internet based on '90s technology rather than protocols developed in the 1960s.

So, what's NSBIOS?

It's about as portable as the Titanic, and slightly less innovative.