Why don't computers use cartridges for everything?

Sounds crazy but I seriously want to know why.

Ok.......here we go:

Say you had a computer and it had an embedded OS. You wanted to use either Microsoft office or Open Office. You simply went to the store and bought your application and it was a cartridge. You came home and put the office cartridge in and bammm your application was installed and worked. Done using office? Just take out the cartridge. You would save your files either on-line or to a small disk somewhere.

Want to play your favorite game? Just throw your Half-Life cartridge into the front of your PC and it loads up the game in like 3 seconds. Think past needing to have a special name when you play online or special configs. It would give you a random name when you played online or names to choose from and you would be able to choose from like 3 config files for your key set up.

Your computer would basically look like it does now, but with like 10 slots in the front for your cartridges. If you needed to run something you just take one of the other 10 out of the slot and then put it back in later when you're done. Or heck.....leave as many or as few cartridges in at one time

No Virii (viruses).
No Crashes.
No Reloading.
Nothing. Just use it.

I envision the cartridges looking about like the size of a wide zip disk. Everything solid state, no moving parts. You wouldn't need a hard drive, you would just need lots of RAM. No CD Player needed. Maybe a DVD. You get the point.

Any opinions on why this would or would not be a good idea?

Thanks

That would be like making my pc into a Nintendo64 or something! i think the reason they dont do that is because a computer needs an operating system on it... things like nintendo's can run off cartridges because they all have identical hardware where as a computer has different hardware to the next computer, the reason they have an OS is so that programs can be made smaller... if there were to be no OS the program would have to configure itself to work on your hardware, which would make the size of programs over-large and resource-hogging

You know I find this interesting. I always wondered why the os is not on a chip or something. Maybe you could invent something? I think it would be an improvement in security related issues as well.

just had a random thought, you could put the OS on one of the cartridges, and then the other applications could use it... yay i gave a solution to a problem that i pointed out..

I just think that there is no reason, for businesses, that computing could be this simple. Or people at home who just want a joe blow clone box and don't care if it's just like 300,000 other PC's.

I know there are thin clients and Citrix, but that is not really what I mean.

It just seems like it would solve a lot of problems and make a lot of people happy. IT Directors would be able to just fire their whole department. I would be out of a job. Computers would be cheap. So would the cartridges. I would become "old hat" and my skills would be useless....

That is what I am saying. Then put programs on the cartridge like Whitehat is saying. I down'y really think this would be hard to implement look at pocket pc, look at the expansion slot? then all the hardrive would be for is to load the things you have on it. I think that this would be great for security because almost everyone owns a cd burner and can copy all there software off the hard drive and save it to disk so that in case of a virus the could wipe the drive withouttampering with the os. This would be a great idea. They could also make like flash updates for the os or the software you buy on the cartridge.

Actually in my post I state that the OS would be embedded....so I wouldn't need to be on a cartridge.

On another note each OS could be on a cartridge. Just throw in WinXp, or Linux, or MacOS whatever..........don't matter..........all fits just fine

Of course all the hardware would be the same.

If you think about it, that's what you have with PDAs now. Software generally comes on cartidges or as downloads. Most PDAs are as powerful as desktop machines were 10 years ago.

shhhh! make it sell it get rich

ahhhh but you forgot 1 little thing multitasking, I generally have at least 3 apps running at once that i switch back and forth 2 under your system that means it would be impossible to accomplish. 2 those cartridges are rather small why do you think nintendo abondoned them. There are probably other reason why this isn't done but i can't think of them at the moment.

I am thinking that with 10 cartridges you can have 10 things running at the same time. I never use more than like 6-7 things at once

Hmm....

define things.

LOL

Things for me = Winamp, Office, Web Browser, GAIM, LICQ, Email, Rdesktop, etc...

At most times I have Winamp, a text editor, IM client, Email, and a web browser open. Usually never more than that.....unless I'm at work.

At work Things = SMS, Cisco VPN monitor, IM client, Browser, Outlook 2003, Access 2003, Winamp, Symantec System Center, a few MMC windows, I have other network shares open, and about 3 other operating systems running under VMWare too.

ah but those are visible programs. but even if you have no visible programs running you have at least ~20 processes in linux (unless you really slim down your distro down). if we used your cartridge system either:

A. you would need a cartridge for every process (erm not that good)

B. the necessary processes would need to be part of the operating system in one super-duper-process. that doesnt make sense with something like linux or UNIX, because everything is supposed to be seperated. i personally would not like to see the kernel incorporate a GUI and desktop manager and everything. that would be unstable like a certain other operating system.

this system would be complicated, slow, probably not very successful at all, and not to mention it would be extremely limiting in the number of things you run (going against years and years of multitasking development and ideas) sorry.

it's kinda like this game idea i had a few years back (when i still played games) that a game should have a bootable disk and the game should be it's own operating system. not a good idea i had there.

Ya know, I thought thats the way things were going A few years ago when AMD and INTEL had those cpu cartridges, They were pretty cool. It would be nice if things were made modular for simplicity and ease of replacement.