What? Google is working on an operating system? Of course they are! They are working on everything.

gOS -- not sure what the 'g' stands for -- is a lot like the Asus Express Gate, the Linux mini-kernel they are putting on their recent motherboards. It boots up quick, and is built around the Google Chrome browser.

Following the cloud computing concept, gOS is basically meant to use applications through the web, streaming stuff to your desktop, instead of running local files on your hard drive.

This early video has Mac OS-like icons on the bottom of the screen, basically as visual icons for bookmarks: for sites like gMail, YouTube, etcetra.

At these early states, I could see gOS being really useful for installation in older machines, and ultra-portable computers, or maybe for completely non-computer savvy people like many grandparents, who would just like to use a few things like email, and don't want to have to worry about fighting off computer viruses or installing new drivers and such.

As for the future, I'm sure Google will turn gOS into something much more intriguing.

Random nerd-tacular trivia of the day: Back in the 1986 another 'g'OS came out: GEOS. The Graphic Enivornment Operating System ran on the 8-bit Commodore 64 in only 64 kilobytes of RAM, required no hard drive and only about one megahertz of a computational power to run. It was very advanced for it's time, offering a GUI sort of like the one found on earlier Macs, and came out well before the original Windows 3.1. At its height of popularity it was the world's third most sold operating system, behind MS-DOS and Mac OS.