6 ms·

The OS Doesn’t Matter…

49 points by mjfern 16y ago

aspir 16y ago
Though this is slightly unrelated, I wish I could send this article to every software company who makes the tools I need, but only makes them windows compatible. I'm all unix on my end, but I'm having to scrape together emergency funds for a windows box that can run ESRI and other GIS systems (my systems are just old enough to prevent a feasible dual boot as well). It's not huge issue, but definitely an inconvenience.
- Someone 16y ago
  I am not familiar with current pricing, but if you need to scrape together funds, I would guess that buying GIS software would be out of the question. Nowadays, most specialized PC software is more expensive than the minimal amount of hardware it needs to run.
  - aspir 16y ago
    You're correct about the software- it's brutally priced. But I have access to University copies that, though underpowered, can work for what I'm trying to do right now. I'm extremely lucky though.
    - Someone 16y ago
      Aha, now your statement makes sense to me. I did not think of that possibility.
soult 16y ago
Actually Windows NT was a completely new kernel that had nothing to do with the old Windows 3.1/95/98/ME stuff.
- Terretta 16y ago
  "Actually", his sentence begins with the word "Initially". > Initially built on top of DOS, Microsoft painstakingly added version after version, always striving for backward compatibility while, at the same time, adding new features. It was "initially" built on DOS. And over time, Microsoft painstaking strove for backward compatibility, not giving it up even for a major architecture change. NT offered a DOS VM (VDM) / Windows VM (WoW)[1], and Windows 7 offers an XP VM [2]. [1] http://kb.iu.edu/data/acxn.html http://kb.iu.edu/data/acxn.html [2] http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx
  - _delirium 16y ago
    His sentence does seem misleading to me: it reads like he thinks Windows at the core OS level (the scheduling/memory-management/drivers/etc. stuff he mentions in the intro) is still incrementally built on top of the old DOS-lineage code, as opposed to recognizing that it underwent a complete rewrite. If he's just arguing that the API evolution has been constrained by the need for backwards compatibility, that's true, but doesn't make much sense to his point in this context.
  - gaius 16y ago
    Yes and "initially" Unix could only run one process at a time. But modern Unix is far in advance, and modern Windows is far in advance of DOS.
    - borism 16y ago
      What are you talking about? Even Multics was multitasking. Heck, that's already in the name.
      - gaius 16y ago
        Unix has no code in common with Multics. In the first Unix, starting a process from the shell did exec, not fork. When the "child" process exited, the kernel would restart the shell. All the process control stuff came when Unix was rewritten in C from the original assembly.
melipone 16y ago
Let's not forget Lisp OSes like Genera or Xerox's. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
j_baker 16y ago
To me, this is like a automotive executive saying "the engine doesn't matter, they're all the same anyway". The engine probably doesn't directly matter to most customers and they are mostly the same. However, it's lunacy to say that the heart of your product isn't important. If the engine has problems, your customers have problems. If the OS has problems, your customers have problems too. Yeah, developer tools and APIs are very important, but they're only as good as the platform they target.
- KeithMajhor 16y ago
  The majority of available operating systems provide similar system interfaces. The same is not true for user experience, developer tools and APIs. His point is that these peripheral features will determine the success of operating systems. Consumers are more concerned with the shape of a car than the engine that's inside.
  - j_baker 16y ago
    Customers do care about the engine, just not explicitly. They may want a car that goes fast, gets good gas milage, and is reliable. They won't ask about the engine, but it has an effect on those things. By that same token, customers want a mobile phone that is fast, gets good battery life, and is reliable. Again, they won't ask about the OS, but it has an effect on those things. Thus, customers care about the OS; they just don't know it. Plus, I shouldn't have to tell you that similar interface != the same thing.
- Someone 16y ago
  On top of that, the border between OS and libraries is fuzzy; OS providers will move it to get a competitive advantage. 3D graphics (historically, even 2D graphics), virtualisation, garbage collected runtimes, the list is endless.
larsberg 16y ago
This post is amusing because it writes off Windows, but then claims that the UX and the developer tools are the two areas where there's a lot of work to be done on modern UNIX systems. For those who haven't used them professionally, Microsoft's developer tools are absolutely fantastic. And not just the editors, debuggers, and code assistance -- the profiling, system monitoring, and large project workflow tools are years ahead of anything that you can get off-Windows. Even if you're willing to pay Real Money to IBM, the only other serious tools vendor left, or pre-merger Sun, which had the best non-Windows profiling support in-system. Coming back to XCode, the GNU stack, and Eclipse after years on the MSFT platform was like taking a flying leap back into 1998. UX is pretty consistent on both the Apple and Windows platforms. Once you learn a couple of apps, you've basically learned them all. I can't say that for the Linux desktop, where apps still seem to be roughly as consistent as architectural patterns across 3rd party Java frameworks. It's hard to imagine something "better" without moving to a new device factor so that you don't alienate your user base.
- poet 16y ago
  "The profiling, system monitoring, and large project workflow tools are years ahead of anything that you can get off-Windows." It's patently false that the profiling and system monitoring tools you can get on Windows are years ahead of anything you can get on a different platform. In fact, it's the opposite [1, 2]. And I wont even get into the fact that we're still catching up to 30 year old Lisp machines in the areas of editor integration, debuggers, and code assistance. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace [2] http://valgrind.org/ http://valgrind.org/
  - gaius 16y ago
    I don't think you've experienced the level of integration Visual Studio brings to this. DTrace and Valgrind are great but they would need to be seamlessly integrated into Eclipse to be comparable.
    - poet 16y ago
      Uh, I have access to GDB, Valgrind, and DTrace through Emacs (either through GUD or a separate mode). The integration is seamless enough for me, and if it wasn't, I could spend an hour writing an Emacs Lisp extension to fix it. This is classic FUD.
iuguy 16y ago
> The App Store genre, invented or not in Cupertino, is now part of that loop, a killer OS component, one that deserves a Monday Note of its own. There's very little out there that Apple can honestly lay claim to having invented. Refined, improved, made look silky smooth, sure. Invented? No. OSX is built on ... *Step technology. The Mac OS Classic GUI is taken from the Lisa, which is taken from the Xerox Parc. The MP3 Player? Nope, not theirs either. All of those are great examples of something Apple has taken from elsewhere, refined and improved. The App Store concept had been implemented some time beforehand by Linspire (with Click 'n' Buy for Lindows) which in turn was a front-end to Debian's APT package management tool.
- technomancy 16y ago
  > The App Store concept had been implemented some time beforehand by Linspire (with Click 'n' Buy for Lindows) which in turn was a front-end to Debian's APT package management tool. Saying that the App Store is an improvement over apt is a huge stretch though; it's not nearly as comprehensive.
- RexRollman 16y ago
  BeOS had an online application store before Linspire, I believe.
  - iuguy 16y ago
    You're right, I vaguely remember BeDepot. I can't remember whether or not you could buy software (as I wasn't much of a BeOS user).
- protomyth 16y ago
  The basic idea is from Xerox (bought a paid by Apple stock), but the refinements done by the Mac team are really not given enough credit. I wish Parc had been able to release their stuff, but one should really go search for how their windowing system actually worked. The Mac team did some serious refinements (not to mention an amazing job of getting it to run on such a resource starved system). Truthfully though, the current Apple is really more of an NeXT takeover of Apple and *Step is a direct legacy.
RexRollman 16y ago
I wish the writer of this article, Jean-Louis Gassée, could have had better luck leading Be Inc and BeOS, as it was my all time favorite OS. I still run it in emulation, from time to time.
jsz0 16y ago
I got interested in technology at the time when the mantra was "UNIX is dead, Windows is the future" It's amazing how much things have changed. It's probably a testament to how good Windows actually is that Microsoft has been able to hold onto the desktop computer market while the rest of the technology industry has adopted Linux/UNIX on such a large scale. It's a fun exercise to make a mental note of all the various Linux/UNIX devices you see in a day. SOHO routers, TIVOs, TVs, SmartPhones etc. It's everywhere.
extension 16y ago
"The OS" doesn't matter because it has been decoupled from "the platform", which remains crucial. Developing for Android or iOS, you are exposed only to vague clues that they are implemented on top of Unix. The only reason the OS ever did matter is because virtual machines and complete API abstraction layers have not always been practical. Also, writing off QNX as just another Unix is a mistake. An RTOS with synchronous IPC baked in to the kernel is potentially game changing technology, though I am skeptical that RIM will manage to fully exploit it.
- glhaynes 16y ago
  What advantages do you expect those attributes of QNX could bring to RIM and their users? I understand that QNX has more sophisticated real time capabilities than Android's Linux and iOS' Mach/BSD kernel, but what does that make possible/easier for applications and frameworks on top of QNX than on top of those other kernels? I certainly agree with you that "the OS" doesn't just mean the kernel nor even the basic userland anymore.
  - extension 16y ago
    It's a big topic, but in a nutshell: when you can make calls across processes, simply and efficiently, it opens a world of possibilities for interoperation between applications. You can't fake this with sockets, no matter what you layer on top. Surprisingly, it was the legacy BlackBerry OS that made me realize this. It has seamless IPC too, but only as a side effect of a horrifically insecure and unstable memory model.
    - glhaynes 16y ago
      Do you have any examples or links? I'm sorry, I'm really interested in what you're saying but I'm just having trouble imagining how it would affect my architecture or what I could do with it that I couldn't feasibly do without. Thanks. And, yeah, things were a whole lot easier back before all this silly security and memory protection, weren't they? :)
      - 16y ago
Groxx 16y ago
>Windows will live on — in a PC industry now at a plateau. In America, maybe. Are they claiming the number of PCs will not increase significantly? Especially given their losing ground to OSX, they're most certainly not at a plateau that isn't self-inflicted.
- billswift 16y ago
  Yes, but large parts of the world are explicitly trying to avoid becoming dependent on MS software. While Windows is still growing in other countries, quite a few are subsidizing or requiring the use of other OSes (usually linux), trying to avoid too much lock-in. [Added: OK, I see what you are getting at, I had read the original paper to mean that Windows on PCs was at a plateau; it is pretty common to use PC to mean a PC with Windows. And with iPads, netbooks, smart phones and the like, the PC form factor might actually be at a plateau itself, or approaching one.]
  - Groxx 16y ago
    Certainly. But that does not imply at all that the PC industry is at a plateau, simply that MS may be.
dbrannan 16y ago
To me it looked like Apple would scrap OS 9 for BeOS, but after Steve Jobs came back it was forgotten. I remember playing around with BeOS at the time and thought it was pretty fun, though I don't know much about it. Is it UNIX based? Has it gone anywhere since?
- masklinn 16y ago
  > To me it looked like Apple would scrap OS 9 for BeOS, but after Steve Jobs came back it was forgotten. Erm... Jobs came back because the BeOS deal didn't go through. That was the point: Apple could go on their own, with Be or with NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP was Jobs's company. > Is it UNIX based? No, though it has a POSIX compatibility layer (and therefore access to BSD CLI utils) > Has it gone anywhere since? Be, Inc was sold to Palm for a penny in 2001 and BeOS was killed. Fans are writing an OpenSource BeOS (with no IP-relations to the original one, but goals of being able to run BeOS binaries unmodified for instance) with Haiku: http://haiku-os.org/ http://haiku-os.org/
  - dbrannan 16y ago
    So, now BeOS is owned by HP?
    - masklinn 16y ago
      Technically yes, though actually BeOS is dead (unless you count Haiku).
siculars 16y ago
When many database systems or language implementations rely on os cache, scheduling, threading and eventing implementations among other things then yes, the os matters.

49 points by mjfern 16y ago

aspir 16y ago

Though this is slightly unrelated, I wish I could send this article to every software company who makes the tools I need, but only makes them windows compatible. I'm all unix on my end, but I'm having to scrape together emergency funds for a windows box that can run ESRI and other GIS systems (my systems are just old enough to prevent a feasible dual boot as well). It's not huge issue, but definitely an inconvenience.

Someone 16y ago
I am not familiar with current pricing, but if you need to scrape together funds, I would guess that buying GIS software would be out of the question. Nowadays, most specialized PC software is more expensive than the minimal amount of hardware it needs to run.
- aspir 16y ago
  You're correct about the software- it's brutally priced. But I have access to University copies that, though underpowered, can work for what I'm trying to do right now. I'm extremely lucky though.
  - Someone 16y ago
    Aha, now your statement makes sense to me. I did not think of that possibility.

soult 16y ago

Actually Windows NT was a completely new kernel that had nothing to do with the old Windows 3.1/95/98/ME stuff.

Terretta 16y ago
"Actually", his sentence begins with the word "Initially". > Initially built on top of DOS, Microsoft painstakingly added version after version, always striving for backward compatibility while, at the same time, adding new features. It was "initially" built on DOS. And over time, Microsoft painstaking strove for backward compatibility, not giving it up even for a major architecture change. NT offered a DOS VM (VDM) / Windows VM (WoW)[1], and Windows 7 offers an XP VM [2]. [1] http://kb.iu.edu/data/acxn.html http://kb.iu.edu/data/acxn.html [2] http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx
- _delirium 16y ago
  His sentence does seem misleading to me: it reads like he thinks Windows at the core OS level (the scheduling/memory-management/drivers/etc. stuff he mentions in the intro) is still incrementally built on top of the old DOS-lineage code, as opposed to recognizing that it underwent a complete rewrite. If he's just arguing that the API evolution has been constrained by the need for backwards compatibility, that's true, but doesn't make much sense to his point in this context.
- gaius 16y ago
  Yes and "initially" Unix could only run one process at a time. But modern Unix is far in advance, and modern Windows is far in advance of DOS.
  - borism 16y ago
    What are you talking about? Even Multics was multitasking. Heck, that's already in the name.
    - gaius 16y ago
      Unix has no code in common with Multics. In the first Unix, starting a process from the shell did exec, not fork. When the "child" process exited, the kernel would restart the shell. All the process control stuff came when Unix was rewritten in C from the original assembly.

melipone 16y ago

Let's not forget Lisp OSes like Genera or Xerox's. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

j_baker 16y ago

To me, this is like a automotive executive saying "the engine doesn't matter, they're all the same anyway". The engine probably doesn't directly matter to most customers and they are mostly the same. However, it's lunacy to say that the heart of your product isn't important. If the engine has problems, your customers have problems. If the OS has problems, your customers have problems too. Yeah, developer tools and APIs are very important, but they're only as good as the platform they target.

KeithMajhor 16y ago
The majority of available operating systems provide similar system interfaces. The same is not true for user experience, developer tools and APIs. His point is that these peripheral features will determine the success of operating systems. Consumers are more concerned with the shape of a car than the engine that's inside.
- j_baker 16y ago
  Customers do care about the engine, just not explicitly. They may want a car that goes fast, gets good gas milage, and is reliable. They won't ask about the engine, but it has an effect on those things. By that same token, customers want a mobile phone that is fast, gets good battery life, and is reliable. Again, they won't ask about the OS, but it has an effect on those things. Thus, customers care about the OS; they just don't know it. Plus, I shouldn't have to tell you that similar interface != the same thing.
Someone 16y ago
On top of that, the border between OS and libraries is fuzzy; OS providers will move it to get a competitive advantage. 3D graphics (historically, even 2D graphics), virtualisation, garbage collected runtimes, the list is endless.

larsberg 16y ago

This post is amusing because it writes off Windows, but then claims that the UX and the developer tools are the two areas where there's a lot of work to be done on modern UNIX systems. For those who haven't used them professionally, Microsoft's developer tools are absolutely fantastic. And not just the editors, debuggers, and code assistance -- the profiling, system monitoring, and large project workflow tools are years ahead of anything that you can get off-Windows. Even if you're willing to pay Real Money to IBM, the only other serious tools vendor left, or pre-merger Sun, which had the best non-Windows profiling support in-system. Coming back to XCode, the GNU stack, and Eclipse after years on the MSFT platform was like taking a flying leap back into 1998. UX is pretty consistent on both the Apple and Windows platforms. Once you learn a couple of apps, you've basically learned them all. I can't say that for the Linux desktop, where apps still seem to be roughly as consistent as architectural patterns across 3rd party Java frameworks. It's hard to imagine something "better" without moving to a new device factor so that you don't alienate your user base.

poet 16y ago
"The profiling, system monitoring, and large project workflow tools are years ahead of anything that you can get off-Windows." It's patently false that the profiling and system monitoring tools you can get on Windows are years ahead of anything you can get on a different platform. In fact, it's the opposite [1, 2]. And I wont even get into the fact that we're still catching up to 30 year old Lisp machines in the areas of editor integration, debuggers, and code assistance. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace [2] http://valgrind.org/ http://valgrind.org/
- gaius 16y ago
  I don't think you've experienced the level of integration Visual Studio brings to this. DTrace and Valgrind are great but they would need to be seamlessly integrated into Eclipse to be comparable.
  - poet 16y ago
    Uh, I have access to GDB, Valgrind, and DTrace through Emacs (either through GUD or a separate mode). The integration is seamless enough for me, and if it wasn't, I could spend an hour writing an Emacs Lisp extension to fix it. This is classic FUD.

iuguy 16y ago

> The App Store genre, invented or not in Cupertino, is now part of that loop, a killer OS component, one that deserves a Monday Note of its own. There's very little out there that Apple can honestly lay claim to having invented. Refined, improved, made look silky smooth, sure. Invented? No. OSX is built on ... *Step technology. The Mac OS Classic GUI is taken from the Lisa, which is taken from the Xerox Parc. The MP3 Player? Nope, not theirs either. All of those are great examples of something Apple has taken from elsewhere, refined and improved. The App Store concept had been implemented some time beforehand by Linspire (with Click 'n' Buy for Lindows) which in turn was a front-end to Debian's APT package management tool.

technomancy 16y ago
> The App Store concept had been implemented some time beforehand by Linspire (with Click 'n' Buy for Lindows) which in turn was a front-end to Debian's APT package management tool. Saying that the App Store is an improvement over apt is a huge stretch though; it's not nearly as comprehensive.
RexRollman 16y ago
BeOS had an online application store before Linspire, I believe.
- iuguy 16y ago
  You're right, I vaguely remember BeDepot. I can't remember whether or not you could buy software (as I wasn't much of a BeOS user).
protomyth 16y ago
The basic idea is from Xerox (bought a paid by Apple stock), but the refinements done by the Mac team are really not given enough credit. I wish Parc had been able to release their stuff, but one should really go search for how their windowing system actually worked. The Mac team did some serious refinements (not to mention an amazing job of getting it to run on such a resource starved system). Truthfully though, the current Apple is really more of an NeXT takeover of Apple and *Step is a direct legacy.

RexRollman 16y ago

I wish the writer of this article, Jean-Louis Gassée, could have had better luck leading Be Inc and BeOS, as it was my all time favorite OS. I still run it in emulation, from time to time.

jsz0 16y ago

I got interested in technology at the time when the mantra was "UNIX is dead, Windows is the future" It's amazing how much things have changed. It's probably a testament to how good Windows actually is that Microsoft has been able to hold onto the desktop computer market while the rest of the technology industry has adopted Linux/UNIX on such a large scale. It's a fun exercise to make a mental note of all the various Linux/UNIX devices you see in a day. SOHO routers, TIVOs, TVs, SmartPhones etc. It's everywhere.

extension 16y ago

"The OS" doesn't matter because it has been decoupled from "the platform", which remains crucial. Developing for Android or iOS, you are exposed only to vague clues that they are implemented on top of Unix. The only reason the OS ever did matter is because virtual machines and complete API abstraction layers have not always been practical. Also, writing off QNX as just another Unix is a mistake. An RTOS with synchronous IPC baked in to the kernel is potentially game changing technology, though I am skeptical that RIM will manage to fully exploit it.

glhaynes 16y ago
What advantages do you expect those attributes of QNX could bring to RIM and their users? I understand that QNX has more sophisticated real time capabilities than Android's Linux and iOS' Mach/BSD kernel, but what does that make possible/easier for applications and frameworks on top of QNX than on top of those other kernels? I certainly agree with you that "the OS" doesn't just mean the kernel nor even the basic userland anymore.
- extension 16y ago
  It's a big topic, but in a nutshell: when you can make calls across processes, simply and efficiently, it opens a world of possibilities for interoperation between applications. You can't fake this with sockets, no matter what you layer on top. Surprisingly, it was the legacy BlackBerry OS that made me realize this. It has seamless IPC too, but only as a side effect of a horrifically insecure and unstable memory model.
  - glhaynes 16y ago
    Do you have any examples or links? I'm sorry, I'm really interested in what you're saying but I'm just having trouble imagining how it would affect my architecture or what I could do with it that I couldn't feasibly do without. Thanks. And, yeah, things were a whole lot easier back before all this silly security and memory protection, weren't they? :)
    - 16y ago

Groxx 16y ago

>Windows will live on — in a PC industry now at a plateau. In America, maybe. Are they claiming the number of PCs will not increase significantly? Especially given their losing ground to OSX, they're most certainly not at a plateau that isn't self-inflicted.

billswift 16y ago
Yes, but large parts of the world are explicitly trying to avoid becoming dependent on MS software. While Windows is still growing in other countries, quite a few are subsidizing or requiring the use of other OSes (usually linux), trying to avoid too much lock-in. [Added: OK, I see what you are getting at, I had read the original paper to mean that Windows on PCs was at a plateau; it is pretty common to use PC to mean a PC with Windows. And with iPads, netbooks, smart phones and the like, the PC form factor might actually be at a plateau itself, or approaching one.]
- Groxx 16y ago
  Certainly. But that does not imply at all that the PC industry is at a plateau, simply that MS may be.

dbrannan 16y ago

To me it looked like Apple would scrap OS 9 for BeOS, but after Steve Jobs came back it was forgotten. I remember playing around with BeOS at the time and thought it was pretty fun, though I don't know much about it. Is it UNIX based? Has it gone anywhere since?

masklinn 16y ago
> To me it looked like Apple would scrap OS 9 for BeOS, but after Steve Jobs came back it was forgotten. Erm... Jobs came back because the BeOS deal didn't go through. That was the point: Apple could go on their own, with Be or with NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP was Jobs's company. > Is it UNIX based? No, though it has a POSIX compatibility layer (and therefore access to BSD CLI utils) > Has it gone anywhere since? Be, Inc was sold to Palm for a penny in 2001 and BeOS was killed. Fans are writing an OpenSource BeOS (with no IP-relations to the original one, but goals of being able to run BeOS binaries unmodified for instance) with Haiku: http://haiku-os.org/ http://haiku-os.org/
- dbrannan 16y ago
  So, now BeOS is owned by HP?
  - masklinn 16y ago
    Technically yes, though actually BeOS is dead (unless you count Haiku).

siculars 16y ago

When many database systems or language implementations rely on os cache, scheduling, threading and eventing implementations among other things then yes, the os matters.