Lilahaa

This doesnt make the distinction between a programming language and an operating system, but in this world I think the two things would actually be one.

Naming

I came up with two OS's used by rival empires, and since they each had full top-down control over all the software that ran on their computers, they each had one (and only one) programming language to go with them. They were known as Lilahaa and Kulapila in Andanese, used by empires that for now I'll call Camia (Lilahaa) and Wamia (Kulapila). I've carried these names through as Žirša and Turpera in Poswa, and Irasa and Wurabera in Pabappa, which makes no sense because Poswa and Pabappa were spoken thousands of years before computers were invented, but I did it because I figured I could explain the names as being named after famous people from even further back in the past that got passed down in the languages as if they were normal words. In my notes Kulapila is defined as an OS "reminiscent of ProDOS". Also Kulapila is very close to the word for "step, stair", so privately I've thought of it as being analogous to NeXTstep.

Operating system as programming language

Computers in this era merged their operating system (OS) with an inbuilt programming language, and generally supported no other programming languages. Yet, the OS itself was stored as binary code and generally could not be edited later on except by people who could read binary code. Thus, any bugs that happened to be included in any release of either of the two major operating systems would remain there unless someone was able to hit on the exact spot in the binary code where the problem manifested itself. Thus in many ways their computers were more similar to humans or animals with DNA than to computers on bimillenial Earth.

Because of the way the software was designed, it generally was not possible to fix bugs in the software, only to write new software that fights teh bugs even if it also adds some bugs of its own. There was no "source code"; everything was directly written in binary. This led to the inability to fix problems that had been introduced further back in time. This severe defect affected both OS's, as it was common to the shared nature of their computer hardware, but there were more bugs in Kulapila than in Lilahaa.

For example, since Kulapila could not read files larger than about 11 MB, when it became necessary to allow larger files to be created, the programmers came up with the idea of splitting files up into 11 MB chunks and creating a new type of file manager that displayed the groups as if they were a single file. The Kulapila of the 20’s had been a mostly textual interface, but GUI features were added throughout the 30’s to make it easier to use. But the programmers were never able to remove the underlying layers, so much like Windows 95/8 a lot of seemingly graphical programs would launch with a console in the upper left corner of the screen that was quickly hidden as if to pretend it were not real.

Perversity

Lilahaa was much more powerful than Kulapila. Kulapila incorporated many user-friendly design principles, aimed at making computers easier to use for casual users, but soon these decisions made Kulapila worse for everyone, including casual users.

By contrast, Lilahaa was a raw-mode OS aimed only at experts, and was far superior in performance to Kulapila in every way. It was very difficult to learn, and even experts sometimes had difficulty using it, but the people of Camia were patriotic enough to learn how to use Lilahaa the expert way, even if they had no general interest in computers. Thus all the groups in Camian society that one would stereotypically expect to be useless with computers were at a level beyond even the best of the Wamians, since Wamia's Kulapila essentially made it impossible to be a computer expert by controlling everything from the top down at the highest level.

Lilahaa's difficult UI was a handicap early on. In the 3920's, Kulapila's easy-to-use approach actually succeeded. Lilahaa expected to win in the long run, but knew that to win they would need to slowly catch up from a starting point far behind Wamia's. Camian programmers were up front with their citizens about the fact that they were using (for now) inferior technology, whereas Wamia's Kulapila programmers tried to hide the truths about those few things in Lilahaa that were superior even in the 20's, such as greater power for individual users.

As Kulapila forged ahead of Lilahaa, Kulapila's programmers soon became unbearably perverse. Conflict arose within the company about which direction to take the operating system, with one side sabotaging the efforts of the other at no gain to themselves and increasing costs to the customer. Because all OS's were written in binary, there was no way to undo these acts of sabotage. Even though Kulapila still had vastly superior resources, they began to fall behind Lilahaa in certain areas and again tried to hide this from their customers. Kulapila sent advertisements over its network extolling the few strengths of their operating system, and then charged the customers for the money they had spent sending the ads.

Soon, backdoors were built into the OS allowing the government to take full control of any citizen’s computer, even to the point of having them buy things online to raise more money for the government. A clock-like device with a numeric currency display was provided to each citizen to show how much money the Wamian government had cost them so far each day. The computers were also made to be easy to destroy, so that if the government wanted people to buy more computers they would send out a virus that would cause the computers to physically self-destruct. However the debt meter was not possible to destroy, and would continue to add up more money owed even when it wasn’t attached to a working computer.

Helpless citizens try to adapt

By the middle of the 30’s, Kulapila was so bad that citizens were secretly buying up old computers from the 20’s since they were easier to use even though they had to keep on buying the new computers as well to satisfy the government’s insistence that everyone own a modern computer. Meanwhile, the Kulapila government ran itself mostly on computers from Lilahaa, since they were unable to produce anything of their own that was capable of running such a large nationwide network.

Camia sends viruses at Wamia

Lilahaa programmers knew this, and periodically sent out viruses and other attacks to the Wamian government's few non-Lilahaa computers in order to destroy the Wamian government, as well as exploiting a few secret backdoors in Lilahaa itself. Many of these virus attacks came from Camian schoolchildren having fun; Camia even had a national holiday, April 12, set aside specifically to allow its grade school students (and adults who felt the desire) to sit down and hack into Wamian computers, particularly those of the Wamian government, while remaining entirely invincible to Wamian revenge because of their own network's much better security.

Wamia hired an army of programmers to write antivirus programs to fight off the Camian programmers, and used these virus attacks as an excuse to their citizens for why the new computers ran so poorly. Antivirus programs were illegal for common citizens in Wamia because the government had no way of designing one that could not also be used to keep out the government spies. (Generally viruses written by Camians disguised themselves as the Wamian government, so any antivirus program designed by the Wamian government would have to allow such viruses access anyway.) Thus the citizens of Wamia were attacked by viruses both from Camian children playing around and their own government deliberately targeting them. Meanwhile, Wamia never attacked Camia with viruses, because they knew that Camia's Lilahaa network was immune to viruses because the Camian government did not demand full control of its users’ computers.

Bugs in Kulapila were much more dangerous than those in Lilahaa because of the infighting and general aimlessness of the Kulapila programmers, such that most of the computer’s resources were spent on fighting different programs in the OS that were trying to delete each other. Sometimes a programmer being fired would deliberately add a virus to the OS that would only activate much later on, long after he was gone. Often a computer would encounter an error that required the user to press a certain key to bypass, and the person would have to call a technician who would come by with a special keyboard that had that key on it, press the key, and hand the customer a bill.

Cybernetic warfare

Because of the way both countries ran their Internet connections, it was possible for Camians to enter Wamia's computer network, but not the other way around: Wamia needed to allow its citizens to access Camia's network in order to conduct business with Camia, but for this to happen, Camians needed to be able to send traffic in the other direction. Additionally, Wamia's government frequently spied on its citizens, and therefore required that all Wamian computers must allow computers from the Wamian government to snoop around on the computers of ordinary citizens. By contrast, Camia did not allow even its government to spy on its citizens, and therefore Camian computers generally could not be hacked even by Camians, let alone by Wamians. Some Camians did hack other Camians to prove it could be done, and were considered heroes for doing so, but even the most successful among them accomplished far less than the typical hacker who went after Wamians.

Camian hackers typically chose to present themselves as the Wamian government in order to gain access to private citizens' computers. However, the best among the hackers could hack the Wamian government itself.

Camia held a nationwide hacking competition every year on April 12 in its schools, where Camian students would be provided Camian computers connected to Wamia's national network, and compete to see which of them could hurt Wamia the most. The general public was invited to compete, and many adults sat down amongst the many children and fought their war on an equal level. Males and females caused similar amounts of damage, but male competitors somewhat outnumbered females because they were more likely to be interested in hacking Wamia even after they were out of school (or in some cases before they had even entered school).

Because the hacking was on the same day every year, Wamian citizens prepared themselves for it by turning off their computers. However, Wamia still needed some computers to stay on at all times in order for the country to run properly; when Wamia's government once tried turning them off, the students stayed in their chairs all night, eating meals donated by local restaurants, and then when the sun came up the next morning and the Wamians figured it was safe to turn everything back on the students began the hacking. From that point on, Wamia agreed not to attempt to evade the hacking holiday, and left its essential computers turned on.

However, the very fact that fewer computers than normal were operating every April 12 meant that those computers were more likely than ever to get hacked. Wamia's government tried to encourage its citizens to leave their home computers turned on, hoping that some of the Camian students would pick easy victims and leave the government alone, but Camia responded by promising higher rewards for students who attacked the generally better-protected Wamian government computers. During one competition, 41 Camian students simultaneously hacked into the Wamian central government network from 41 different entry points. Even though they were competing with each other, the 41 Camian hackers cooperated with each other and hid each other from the Wamian government so they could chat with each other. These conversations were broadcast live on electric billboards all over Wamia, but yet remained hidden from the Wamian government officials trying to stop the hackers.

With so many illegal outsiders running around inside them, the Wamian computer security team was forced to admit defeat and try to make compromises with the hackers in order to lessen the amount of damage they were causing. The winner of the competition that year was a teenage girl named Ginger who managed to get into the Wamian government's tax collection service and raise everyone's taxes by an enormous amount. Because Wamia used instant electronic debt collection to collect its taxes, the government computer believed that the entire nation owed the government money and withdrew large sums of money from the bank accounts of every citizen instantly, putting many into bankruptcy. Then, she transferred the money into her own bank account and realized that she had become (in 2010 US dollars) a billionaire. Wamia tried to reverse the transaction, but found that Ginger had immediately spent much of her money on tangible goods and therefore ensured that the money could not be recovered.

Wamia takes action

Wamia realized now its product was vastly inferior, even without the government spying on its citizens, but continued to spend ever more money advertising to its people about how superior it supposedly was. In the early 40s, the Camian government made a list of ways in which the Kulapila software was still arguably superior and exceeded all of them by wide margins in the next release of Lilahaa. Wamia's response to this was to charge its customers for an ad campaign explaining how Kulapila at its best was almost as good as Lilahaa at its worst.

People of the Meteors

Eventually the situation got so bad that Kulapila realized they needed to start from scratch on a new OS that would work properly for everyone, even if it meant giving up total control. All of their code was contaminated now, so they made a new OS called People of the Meteors (Testapta). They were 30 years behind on programming, but still had roughly comparable hardware resources. At first the new OS was given to only a few people, since giving it to everyone would put the government’s hold on power at risk. In order to keep old software running properly, the programmers decided that every Testapta computer would come with a fully working Kulapila computer running its own OS, and to keep developing Kulapila as a side project even though it would only run within a window attached to the side of the Testapta monitor.

Many people predicted that Testapta would soon become as bad as Kulapila, but because the Kulapila hardware was isolated, the Testapta code never became contaminated. Wamian still spied on its citizens through the Kulapila devices, but was forced to surrender control of its citizens' new Testapta computers.

Camia was scared that they might have a real enemy for the first time in almost 30 years, so they copied the "source code" (actually a series of binaries) of Testapta into Lilahaa and began to adopt some of its features in order to keep its own OS ahead in the race. Perversity was beginning to creep out from within the ranks of the Camian programmers, as well, and for the same reasons; Lilahaa had been so much more successful than its competitor that the programmers realized nothing they did wrong would hurt them at all and they gave up trying to make anything more than incremental improvements to keep their bosses happy. A war of purity erupted in Lilahaa, with the programmers favoring adopting the Testapta source code fighting against those who did not. Eventually the pro-Testapta people won out, and even Wamia's Testapta developers took this as a sign that cooperation might be the best way forward, even though the two empires were still at war.