The Chicken Bus

O n closer examination, the car wasn’t as distinctive as it appeared. To identify it as a Chicken Bus or, more accurately, a Chicken Sports Car, is a disservice to the Central American mechanics who’ve learned how to adapt old American school buses to serve as a transportation system that can carry people across the countryside and deliver chickens to the city, goats to the slaughterhouse, or cash crops to market. To advertise their special role in the local transportation system, these vehicles are usually painted with gaudy colors and clever decorations and are called Chicken Buses. The vehicle that was circling the block had the paint job of a Chicken Bus but the attitude of something very different. It was a low Italian sports car of recent vintage, perhaps a Lamborghini, and it had been decorated in a dark and brooding checkerboard scheme that included arbitrary accents of color and enticing portraits of beautiful women and strong men. We heard the car long before we saw it. The four of us were slowly walking along the street on our way to dinner when we heard sounds that we interpreted as coming from a badly rusted exhaust system. As we looked for the source of the noise, we saw the Chicken Lamborghini accelerate for about 10 or 15 yards, accompanied unlike anything I’d ever seen. The interface involved spinning globes and twisted ribbons. It had a file system that seemed quite strange to me but was completely obvious to the owner. As the machine responded to commands, the screen would unleash various animated objects that seemed to represent data or applications, or both, or neither. At a break, I asked the young man about the machine, and he confirmed that it was indeed a recent model tablet that was running an operating system of his own design. Something in my voice must have expressed shock or disbelief, for he immediately described the system’s origins. It was based on code developed at a university in southeast Asia, perhaps Kuala Lumpur. He had removed the unnecessary sections, written a new kernel and a few drivers, merged some key modules from an underutilized American operating system, and restructured the entire thing. “It’s lean,” he said, “and fast. It has none of the stovepipes that you find on commercial operating systems.” I asked if it could run any of the conventional tablet applications. “No,” he confessed, but he noted that he’d been able to import all the software he needed. Few of us can assemble a modern operating system, even if we’re borrowing parts from other sources. As with all engineering problems, we need to balance the twin factors of stability and control and do so in a way that doesn’t damage either of them. David Alan Grier, George Washington University