An object-oriented operating system is an operating system that internally uses object-oriented methodologies.
An object-oriented operating system is in contrast to an object-oriented user interface or programming framework, which can be placed above a non-object-oriented operating system like DOS, Microsoft Windows or Unix.
It can be argued, however, that there are already object-oriented concepts involved in the design of a more typical operating system such as Unix. While a more traditional language like C does not support object orientation as fluidly as more recent languages, the notion of, for example, a file, stream, or device driver (in Unix, each represented as a file descriptor) can be considered a good example of object orientation: they are, after all, abstract data types, with various methods in the form of system calls, whose behavior varies based on the type of object, whose implementation details are hidden from the caller, and might even use inheritance in their underlying code.
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“Go on then in doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword; shew that reformation is more practicable by operating on the mind than on the body of man.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
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