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I knew Gerstner pulled off a minor miracle at IBM, but I had no idea that he also basically described AWS years before AWS (see the footnote at the end of the "

I knew Gerstner pulled off a minor miracle at IBM, but I had no idea that he also basically described AWS years before AWS (see the footnote at the end of the "IBM's cloud miss" section). That's another corporate what-if for the ages; IBM must still be kicking themselves for letting him go.

foobarian 9y ago
Occasionally I like to reread the introduction in the Corbato, Vyssotsky Multics paper from 1965. It's amazing how long these kinds of ideas were around. "Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) is a comprehensive, general-purpose programming system which is being developed as a research project. The initial Multics system will be implemented on the GE 645 computer. One of the overall design goals is to create a computing system which is capable of meeting almost all of the present and near-future requirements of a large computer utility. Such systems must run continuously and reliably 7 days a week, 24 hours a day in a way similar to telephone or power systems, and must be capable of meeting wide service demands: from multiple man-machine interaction to the sequential processing of absentee-user jobs; from the use of the system with dedicated languages and subsystems to the programming of the system itself; and from centralized bulk card, tape, and printer facilities to remotely located terminals. Such information processing and communication systems are believed to be essential for the future growth of computer use in business, in industry, in government and in scientific laboratories as well as stimulating applications which would be otherwise undone."
- macintux 9y ago
  There are some amazing ideas from that era. In 1985 Jim Gray described how to create hardware and software with a MTBF of decades, yet other than the few people using Erlang those ideas have been ignored ever since. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf
  - hedora 9y ago
    I gotta point out that Jim was roughly one era after Multics. His career ramped up during the mass replacement of navigational databases with relational solutions. Industry and academia were pretty terrible about giving the navigational people credit, or even citing/preserving their work (try getting a copy of a paper from the CODASYL proceedings to see what I mean). Gray strongly disapproved of all that, so I doubt he would want credit for the previous generation's contributions. Anyway, the old hierarchical/navigational/codasyl stuff was mostly forgotten, then reinvented (poorly, at first) as key value stores turned into document databases, etc. Something similar happened with containers, etc. I think the end product of the current generation will surpass the old stuff in most ways, but it is painful to know the history and watch train wrecks of obvious implementation mistakes.
    - macintux 9y ago
      Reminds me of Bret Victor's Future of Programming talk. https://vimeo.com/71278954 https://vimeo.com/71278954

foobarian 9y ago

Occasionally I like to reread the introduction in the Corbato, Vyssotsky Multics paper from 1965. It's amazing how long these kinds of ideas were around. "Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) is a comprehensive, general-purpose programming system which is being developed as a research project. The initial Multics system will be implemented on the GE 645 computer. One of the overall design goals is to create a computing system which is capable of meeting almost all of the present and near-future requirements of a large computer utility. Such systems must run continuously and reliably 7 days a week, 24 hours a day in a way similar to telephone or power systems, and must be capable of meeting wide service demands: from multiple man-machine interaction to the sequential processing of absentee-user jobs; from the use of the system with dedicated languages and subsystems to the programming of the system itself; and from centralized bulk card, tape, and printer facilities to remotely located terminals. Such information processing and communication systems are believed to be essential for the future growth of computer use in business, in industry, in government and in scientific laboratories as well as stimulating applications which would be otherwise undone."

macintux 9y ago
There are some amazing ideas from that era. In 1985 Jim Gray described how to create hardware and software with a MTBF of decades, yet other than the few people using Erlang those ideas have been ignored ever since. http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf
- hedora 9y ago
  I gotta point out that Jim was roughly one era after Multics. His career ramped up during the mass replacement of navigational databases with relational solutions. Industry and academia were pretty terrible about giving the navigational people credit, or even citing/preserving their work (try getting a copy of a paper from the CODASYL proceedings to see what I mean). Gray strongly disapproved of all that, so I doubt he would want credit for the previous generation's contributions. Anyway, the old hierarchical/navigational/codasyl stuff was mostly forgotten, then reinvented (poorly, at first) as key value stores turned into document databases, etc. Something similar happened with containers, etc. I think the end product of the current generation will surpass the old stuff in most ways, but it is painful to know the history and watch train wrecks of obvious implementation mistakes.
  - macintux 9y ago
    Reminds me of Bret Victor's Future of Programming talk. https://vimeo.com/71278954 https://vimeo.com/71278954