11 ms·

I got really into computers in the mid-late 90s by which point we were mostly down to Wintel and Apple hanging on by a thread. What I remember from that era is

I got really into computers in the mid-late 90s by which point we were mostly down to Wintel and Apple hanging on by a thread. What I remember from that era is that nothing was compatible with anything else. It took a lot of work to interoperate between two PCs, let alone cross the gap between OSes. So for a long time, I have kind of taken the current world of few OSes that are highly interoperable as being a great thing: you can build your own Linux machine and still do real work with people on Windows and Mac, etc. But the more I learn about computing in the 80s and early 90s, the more I’m impressed by the variety and diversity of ideas that came out of that era. I see now that today’s standardization has a real cost, which is that we don’t really see new ideas or new paradigms. For the HN crowd, especially those who are older than me and can remember the earlier era of computing, what do you think about that trade off and where we’ve ended up today? Are we better off living in a world where all computers can work together with minimal fuss? Or would it be better if we still had a wide range of vendors taking significantly different approaches and innovating at a much faster pace - albeit in incompatible ways?

Ekaros 6y ago
What I'm personally bit horrified with is that "Unix" is the end all of OS design and so on. With some fundamental designs going back to 70s... Like everything being text. Which seems quite a mess in current world with multimedia and increased networking. Yes we have spend decades hacking to get it to work... But maybe more options and different designs would enrich us lot better. And really we do have layer that can connect all of the different systems together. Namely IP. So even if we had fundamentally different systems, there is no reason why intercommunication wouldn't be possible at this point.
- swiley 6y ago
  IMO Unix hasn't taken over as much as people think it has. If you look at an OS more closely they typically have a POSIX API layer on top of whatever unique ideas they have. Even Linux does quite a lot of its own thing.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Most of the "new" Linux ideas you will find them in the mainframes world.
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      I think this is largely a factor of PCs getting more powerful and the lag to libre implementations. Trying to build container infrastructure during the pentium 90 days wouldn’t have succeeded. See “the innovators dilemma” for the process.
  - njharman 6y ago
    People don't know or underestimate how much Unix has taken over. From cellphones to super computers. From consumer devices to industrial control. Unix servers made and continue to run the internet, aka everything.
    - ithkuil 6y ago
      This! Also, we take now many unix abstractions so much for granted that when they occur in different places we assume it's just convergent evolution.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      POSIX more than anything, many of those IoT OSes aren't anything UNIX related although they support some form of POSIX.
- patterns 6y ago
  This reminds of Robert Pike's "Systems Research is Irrelevant" speech [1]. Now, 20 years after his speech, we are still stuck with the same notions (such as everything being a string). It's not that there are not plenty of alternatives around, however, expectations are so high that it's almost impossible to make a new computer system economically viable. On the other hand, the hacker and maker scene is very active, some of them building operating systems and hardware such as tiny Lisp-based machines [2] and OSes [3]. (My only gripe is that most of the new "avant-garde" systems are still text/file-based.) I'd love to see a next wave in personal computing, starting with a clean slate, building on the research, insights and learning from the mistakes that have been made. I have no doubt that it will happen, the question is only when. As for interoperability: Even on the same platform there are countless problems getting software to talk to each other, so I don't think that a new system will make the situation any worse. [1] http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf [2] https://www.tindie.com/products/lutherjohnson/makerlisp-ez80-lisp-cpm-computer/ https://www.tindie.com/products/lutherjohnson/makerlisp-ez80... [3] https://mezzanos.herokuapp.com/ https://mezzanos.herokuapp.com/
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Yes, it's not either/or. The web is a kind of meta-OS with a very minimal and simple API, and as far as the web is concerned everything in userland operates as a thin-client. The OS is only of interest locally. By the mid-90s I was furious with both Microsoft and Apple for setting computing back by at least a decade. You could - with extreme effort - make an Atari ST multitask. And of course with the Amiga it was built in. So why did we throw that away and go backwards to DOS and then single-process Windows - which eventually reinvented multitasking nearly a decade later and sold it as if it was the most astounding development in the history of computing? Of course there were technical challenges - protected memory, protected processes, and so on. But the earliest versions of Windows didn't have those either. So it was a disappointing and frustrating time - an alienating difference of philosophy between consumer computing designed for creativity and exploration, and box-shifting commodity computing designed for form-filling and bureaucracy, which might allow you to have some fun after hours if you behaved yourself and the machine didn't crash. Considering how smart the Amiga team were, it would have been very interesting to see what they could have done with ubiquitous fast networking, high-res graphics and video, and pocketability. I suspect the result would have been far more open and inspiring than the corporate sand trap we have today.
  - tasogare 6y ago
    > The web is a kind of meta-OS with a very minimal and simple API You may have missed the last 20 years of Web evolution, because the Web is now a very messy and hard to implement platform. Even Microsoft gave up on implementing a browser and switched to Chromium.
  - com2kid 6y ago
    > So why did we throw that away and go backwards to DOS and then single-process Windows - which eventually reinvented multitasking nearly a decade later and sold it as if it was the most astounding development in the history of computing? Because cheap commodity harware, a single Intel CPU controlling everything, won out over an expensive custom multi-chip solution. Every Amiga model was a new model, with large amounts of engineering effort put into it, until eventually the platform just couldn't keep up with how quickly PCs were dropping in cost. Sure in 1989 an Intel x86 based system was a joke compared to an Amiga, and it was a joke in 1990, and 1991, and 1992, but it was less of a joke every year. When it all began PC's didn't even have anything that could charitably be called sound capabilities, but year after new cards were released, there was massive competition, at first at the high end, but then sound cards got cheaper and cheaper until one day Microsoft demanded that for a computer to be Windows Certified it had to just include one, and it was up to OEMs to figure out how. Meanwhile Amiga didn't benefit from that technological explosion. Same thing happened for graphics. Same thing happened for networking. Same thing happened for hard drives, and cd-rom drives, and types of RAM, and literally everything else. Technology has often been one step back two steps forward, going from mini->micro people complained about the same thing, and going from PCs->Smartphones, it happened again. Remember early smartphones / PDAs? They had a maximum process limit, in the low double digits! Storage that was wiped out if the battery died! Everything ran in the same address space! And remember the first 5 or so major versions of Android? It wasn't exactly a pleasant system to use. But it got better. The thing is, all in one custom hardware solutions will always, at first, beat out general purpose computing. But those custom hardware solutions are expensive, and slow, to engineer. Now if you are Apple and you can manage to find economies of scale to do everything in house, great! But Amiga didn't have that scale. They had custom in house everything, which, and they were competing against not just Microsoft, but literally every other consumer PC hardware manufacturer on the planet who were in a fight to the death to drop prices on DOS/Windows PCs peripheral by peripheral.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Good enough, cheap, source code available wins in the long term. Also worse is better. But even worse was a lot better than DOS.
mattmcknight 6y ago
Whatever got us the Internet was worth it. To generalize, it's fine to have a variety of components, as long as the interface between them is roughly standardized, and the innovation can come in the components. That we can have a Playstation and an iPhone use the same network is a good thing, and they can do whatever they want with the rest of the stack. A computer pre-internet felt a lot more like an island. I had an Amiga, but I wasn't aware of 90% of the stuff that was out there, and could barely afford to buy a compiler.
- noizejoy 6y ago
  Not always islands, if you had a modem and a phone line. Pre-Internet were increasingly numerous BBS systems, from big one’s like AOL and CompuServ to medium sized one’s like GEnie and many tiny independents. Instead of remembering URLs you had lists of phone numbers (the smaller one’s requiring long distance calls when those were still expensive) for your little modems to dial. My Atari ST (a contemporary of the Amiga) was online a lot already during those days. I actually connected to the Internet via CompuServ for quite a while before the local phone company began to offer dial-up Internet service. And pirated as well as free software were widely available already back then.
  - mattmcknight 6y ago
    I didn't have a modem for the Amiga for most of the time I owned it (starting in about 1985). I did eventually get one but had trouble getting access to the phone. The BBS sites I did connect to were often full, and many required you to upload something in order to download something. Starting in about 1991 I got access to the Internet at school, and spent most of the time in the lab there, leaving my Amiga behind when I left for college.
- ddingus 6y ago
  I was in a similar scenario during those times. I did end up with internet gateway access in the very late 80s, which helped a lot. Speaking of islands though, check out this FujiNet thing! https://fujinet.online/ https://fujinet.online/ Turns out, Atari 8-bit computers have device independent I/O. Suddenly, all those little islands are connected, and people are writing games in basic, playing together online.
pjmlp 6y ago
Personally I prefer the plethora of OSes approach, and I never been a big UNIX fan to start with. Yes it does have a couple of nice ideas, and it was much better to use than Windows 3.x + MS-DOS, but that is about it. All the UNIX based OSes that I really appreciate, have moved beyond it, namely NeXTSTEP, Solaris/NeWS, Irix, Plan 9/Inferno. Thankfully only BSD and GNU/Linux are stuck into being a continuum of UNIX clones without much to add, when you see their conferences it always boils down to kernel features or filesystems. GNU/Linux has the ingredients to make an Amiga like desktop experience, with D-BUS, GNOME/KDE, but the fragmentation and love for POSIX CLI applications just doesn't make it worthwhile to try to make it work. Look at iOS, macOS, Android, Windows (UWP), GenodeOS, Fuchsia, Haiku, Azure Sphere for the pursuit of modern ideas in OS research. The fact that some of those have a POSIX like kernel (or deeply customise Linux kernel) it is just an implementation detail of the overall architecture.
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  Looks like you missed the whole systemd and cgroups thing. The two are huge and novel developments in OS design, and much more significant than the GUI flimflam you pine for. (Yeah, Linux is a server OS, not news.)
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Systemd is nothing new, Linux copying comercial UNIXes and Windows/VMS, with the community dumping hate left and right on the authors. cgroups has been a thing on mainframes for decades.
    - anthk 6y ago
      SystemD is like Solaris service manager, but far worse. And, on cgroups, I think AIX has something like that but much, much, MUCH better.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        It is called LPAR.
an_opabinia 6y ago
Prior to the iPhone we were “standardized” on resistive touch screens, which sucked compared to the iPhone’s capacitive screen. Not because a stylus was a good way to use a portable device, and not because capacitive touch screen technology was unknown - it was invented long ago. It’s because of cost. You’re just conflating standardization with cost cutting. If there was a cheap and easy to install OS in that era they’d all use it. Oh wait that was DOS & Windows, that was the whole point, that’s what happened, it was adopted because 999/1,000 vendors are interested in cost cutting not innovation. It’s hard to celebrate cost cutters. History never celebrates the crummy cost cutters. I feel no nostalgia for that.
- madhadron 6y ago
  > Not because a stylus was a good way to use a portable device I personally love using a stylus, have have back to my old Palm Pilot days.
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    Resistive digitizers also didn't freak and and refuse to function at all if your fingers were sightly damp. Hence why you'll see a lot of point-of-sale systems in bars using resistive digitizers for their displays.
simonh 6y ago
I think the issue is that, from a user perspective, the implementation details of the kernel and base OS doesn’t matter. As long as it’s sanely implemented and doesn’t impose onerous limitations, it should just get out of the way. The vendor can implement it however they like, with whatever technologies they like, and as long as it supports featureful applications users shouldn’t need to care. The reason Unix was so successful was precisely because it was simple and portable a d designed to get out of the way. It was as unremarkable as possible, by design. All the interesting stuff is left to application developers. You want to implement a relational file system, go ahead. You want to develop your own GUI layer, fine. Compared to the other major OSes of the day like VMS, Pick, PrimeOS, etc it’s as unoppinionated as possible. Likewise with C, which is intended to be as low level and paradigmless as they could. Just an abstraction over assembler just as Unix is a thin abstraction over the hardware.
alexisread 6y ago
I think there have been many missed opportunities in computing, however I'd suggest that the Internet and GPL (open source licencing in general) would have come regardless of the diversity of operating systems. Both these two innovations have really bound the software world together - compatability these days is really at the TCP level (eg. docker and APIs) and allows for a massive diversity of architectures (kafka, istio, materialize.io, IFTTT, Macrometa etc) - the bar has moved in a way. Having said that, some of the missed opportunities of note are: MINT: Gem and Tos weren't really developed much by Atari, but they did buy in MINT which has preemptive multi tasking and memory protection. With the Aes being retargetable (graphic cards), gdos vector fonts and postscript printing, tcp and lan networking stacks, shell, global shortcut system, posix compatibility and multi-user capabilities, it managed to evolve Tos to effectively a unix with usable desktop aka a standard OSX or linux-on-the-desktop well before now. Secondly, choosing A2 instead of Android would have been huge. A compiled multithreaded, multitasking self-hosted OS with GC, zooming UI, 3x faster than Linux and small enough for one person to understand (250k kernel). https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/147091/eth-26082-02.pdf https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.... One other benefit here would have been no Google-Oracle lawsuit to mess with API copyright :)
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  Oracle v. Google would have happened eventually. The underlying problem is the law, not the litigants. In any other field that deals with copyright, the idea that copyright protection extends to what is effectively a series of headings and summaries would be obvious. The problem is that copyright is a poor fit for software - our headings and summaries carry function to them, and changing them breaks code. In general, the law doesn't want to grant copyright over purely functional things, or even things where functionality and creativity are frustratingly mixed. That's why boat hulls and hardware have separate ownership regimes - copyright over them was explicitly rejected. But we also explicitly said software is copyrightable, which leaves open the question of where the unprotected function ends and the protected creativity starts. Maybe in the world where Android never happened, some other company stumbled upon this rich vein of confusion, and we're dealing with SCO/Novell/Attachmate/Whoever v. Apple over who can implement UNIX APIs in their kernels.
jl6 6y ago
This is the way of the world in microcosm. When globalization has smeared all cultures together, and the only languages left are English, Spanish, and Mandarin, the world will be far more interoperable - but at the cost of every other independent niche society. I’m not actually saying it’s not worth it.
- tasogare 6y ago
  The idea that English (in this case Spanish and Mandarin as well) will kill all other languages is debious and forget a very important fact: through most of history and in a lot of places bilingualism is the norm. Current examples are some African countries where languages local are spoken and French is used as vehicular language; Standard Chinese while people speak another Sinitic language. What is likely to happen is more people being proficient in a second or even third languages (like it is in Hong Kong).
pvg 6y ago
The incompatibilities just moved to different places, where the focus of development and competition is. Taken collectively, the various core services of mobile devices, desktop OS's and browsers interoperate very poorly across vendors. Think about stuff like identity, auth, sync; even very basic cases - e.g. user using a couple of Apple devices one of which is a macOS laptop where they run Chrome - are an incomprehensible mess of incompatibility to most non-nerd users.

Ekaros 6y ago

What I'm personally bit horrified with is that "Unix" is the end all of OS design and so on. With some fundamental designs going back to 70s... Like everything being text. Which seems quite a mess in current world with multimedia and increased networking. Yes we have spend decades hacking to get it to work... But maybe more options and different designs would enrich us lot better. And really we do have layer that can connect all of the different systems together. Namely IP. So even if we had fundamentally different systems, there is no reason why intercommunication wouldn't be possible at this point.

swiley 6y ago
IMO Unix hasn't taken over as much as people think it has. If you look at an OS more closely they typically have a POSIX API layer on top of whatever unique ideas they have. Even Linux does quite a lot of its own thing.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Most of the "new" Linux ideas you will find them in the mainframes world.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    I think this is largely a factor of PCs getting more powerful and the lag to libre implementations. Trying to build container infrastructure during the pentium 90 days wouldn’t have succeeded. See “the innovators dilemma” for the process.
- njharman 6y ago
  People don't know or underestimate how much Unix has taken over. From cellphones to super computers. From consumer devices to industrial control. Unix servers made and continue to run the internet, aka everything.
  - ithkuil 6y ago
    This! Also, we take now many unix abstractions so much for granted that when they occur in different places we assume it's just convergent evolution.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    POSIX more than anything, many of those IoT OSes aren't anything UNIX related although they support some form of POSIX.
patterns 6y ago
This reminds of Robert Pike's "Systems Research is Irrelevant" speech [1]. Now, 20 years after his speech, we are still stuck with the same notions (such as everything being a string). It's not that there are not plenty of alternatives around, however, expectations are so high that it's almost impossible to make a new computer system economically viable. On the other hand, the hacker and maker scene is very active, some of them building operating systems and hardware such as tiny Lisp-based machines [2] and OSes [3]. (My only gripe is that most of the new "avant-garde" systems are still text/file-based.) I'd love to see a next wave in personal computing, starting with a clean slate, building on the research, insights and learning from the mistakes that have been made. I have no doubt that it will happen, the question is only when. As for interoperability: Even on the same platform there are countless problems getting software to talk to each other, so I don't think that a new system will make the situation any worse. [1] http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf http://www.herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf [2] https://www.tindie.com/products/lutherjohnson/makerlisp-ez80-lisp-cpm-computer/ https://www.tindie.com/products/lutherjohnson/makerlisp-ez80... [3] https://mezzanos.herokuapp.com/ https://mezzanos.herokuapp.com/
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Yes, it's not either/or. The web is a kind of meta-OS with a very minimal and simple API, and as far as the web is concerned everything in userland operates as a thin-client. The OS is only of interest locally. By the mid-90s I was furious with both Microsoft and Apple for setting computing back by at least a decade. You could - with extreme effort - make an Atari ST multitask. And of course with the Amiga it was built in. So why did we throw that away and go backwards to DOS and then single-process Windows - which eventually reinvented multitasking nearly a decade later and sold it as if it was the most astounding development in the history of computing? Of course there were technical challenges - protected memory, protected processes, and so on. But the earliest versions of Windows didn't have those either. So it was a disappointing and frustrating time - an alienating difference of philosophy between consumer computing designed for creativity and exploration, and box-shifting commodity computing designed for form-filling and bureaucracy, which might allow you to have some fun after hours if you behaved yourself and the machine didn't crash. Considering how smart the Amiga team were, it would have been very interesting to see what they could have done with ubiquitous fast networking, high-res graphics and video, and pocketability. I suspect the result would have been far more open and inspiring than the corporate sand trap we have today.
- tasogare 6y ago
  > The web is a kind of meta-OS with a very minimal and simple API You may have missed the last 20 years of Web evolution, because the Web is now a very messy and hard to implement platform. Even Microsoft gave up on implementing a browser and switched to Chromium.
- com2kid 6y ago
  > So why did we throw that away and go backwards to DOS and then single-process Windows - which eventually reinvented multitasking nearly a decade later and sold it as if it was the most astounding development in the history of computing? Because cheap commodity harware, a single Intel CPU controlling everything, won out over an expensive custom multi-chip solution. Every Amiga model was a new model, with large amounts of engineering effort put into it, until eventually the platform just couldn't keep up with how quickly PCs were dropping in cost. Sure in 1989 an Intel x86 based system was a joke compared to an Amiga, and it was a joke in 1990, and 1991, and 1992, but it was less of a joke every year. When it all began PC's didn't even have anything that could charitably be called sound capabilities, but year after new cards were released, there was massive competition, at first at the high end, but then sound cards got cheaper and cheaper until one day Microsoft demanded that for a computer to be Windows Certified it had to just include one, and it was up to OEMs to figure out how. Meanwhile Amiga didn't benefit from that technological explosion. Same thing happened for graphics. Same thing happened for networking. Same thing happened for hard drives, and cd-rom drives, and types of RAM, and literally everything else. Technology has often been one step back two steps forward, going from mini->micro people complained about the same thing, and going from PCs->Smartphones, it happened again. Remember early smartphones / PDAs? They had a maximum process limit, in the low double digits! Storage that was wiped out if the battery died! Everything ran in the same address space! And remember the first 5 or so major versions of Android? It wasn't exactly a pleasant system to use. But it got better. The thing is, all in one custom hardware solutions will always, at first, beat out general purpose computing. But those custom hardware solutions are expensive, and slow, to engineer. Now if you are Apple and you can manage to find economies of scale to do everything in house, great! But Amiga didn't have that scale. They had custom in house everything, which, and they were competing against not just Microsoft, but literally every other consumer PC hardware manufacturer on the planet who were in a fight to the death to drop prices on DOS/Windows PCs peripheral by peripheral.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Good enough, cheap, source code available wins in the long term. Also worse is better. But even worse was a lot better than DOS.

mattmcknight 6y ago

Whatever got us the Internet was worth it. To generalize, it's fine to have a variety of components, as long as the interface between them is roughly standardized, and the innovation can come in the components. That we can have a Playstation and an iPhone use the same network is a good thing, and they can do whatever they want with the rest of the stack. A computer pre-internet felt a lot more like an island. I had an Amiga, but I wasn't aware of 90% of the stuff that was out there, and could barely afford to buy a compiler.

noizejoy 6y ago
Not always islands, if you had a modem and a phone line. Pre-Internet were increasingly numerous BBS systems, from big one’s like AOL and CompuServ to medium sized one’s like GEnie and many tiny independents. Instead of remembering URLs you had lists of phone numbers (the smaller one’s requiring long distance calls when those were still expensive) for your little modems to dial. My Atari ST (a contemporary of the Amiga) was online a lot already during those days. I actually connected to the Internet via CompuServ for quite a while before the local phone company began to offer dial-up Internet service. And pirated as well as free software were widely available already back then.
- mattmcknight 6y ago
  I didn't have a modem for the Amiga for most of the time I owned it (starting in about 1985). I did eventually get one but had trouble getting access to the phone. The BBS sites I did connect to were often full, and many required you to upload something in order to download something. Starting in about 1991 I got access to the Internet at school, and spent most of the time in the lab there, leaving my Amiga behind when I left for college.
ddingus 6y ago
I was in a similar scenario during those times. I did end up with internet gateway access in the very late 80s, which helped a lot. Speaking of islands though, check out this FujiNet thing! https://fujinet.online/ https://fujinet.online/ Turns out, Atari 8-bit computers have device independent I/O. Suddenly, all those little islands are connected, and people are writing games in basic, playing together online.

pjmlp 6y ago

Personally I prefer the plethora of OSes approach, and I never been a big UNIX fan to start with. Yes it does have a couple of nice ideas, and it was much better to use than Windows 3.x + MS-DOS, but that is about it. All the UNIX based OSes that I really appreciate, have moved beyond it, namely NeXTSTEP, Solaris/NeWS, Irix, Plan 9/Inferno. Thankfully only BSD and GNU/Linux are stuck into being a continuum of UNIX clones without much to add, when you see their conferences it always boils down to kernel features or filesystems. GNU/Linux has the ingredients to make an Amiga like desktop experience, with D-BUS, GNOME/KDE, but the fragmentation and love for POSIX CLI applications just doesn't make it worthwhile to try to make it work. Look at iOS, macOS, Android, Windows (UWP), GenodeOS, Fuchsia, Haiku, Azure Sphere for the pursuit of modern ideas in OS research. The fact that some of those have a POSIX like kernel (or deeply customise Linux kernel) it is just an implementation detail of the overall architecture.

otabdeveloper4 6y ago
Looks like you missed the whole systemd and cgroups thing. The two are huge and novel developments in OS design, and much more significant than the GUI flimflam you pine for. (Yeah, Linux is a server OS, not news.)
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Systemd is nothing new, Linux copying comercial UNIXes and Windows/VMS, with the community dumping hate left and right on the authors. cgroups has been a thing on mainframes for decades.
  - anthk 6y ago
    SystemD is like Solaris service manager, but far worse. And, on cgroups, I think AIX has something like that but much, much, MUCH better.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      It is called LPAR.

an_opabinia 6y ago

Prior to the iPhone we were “standardized” on resistive touch screens, which sucked compared to the iPhone’s capacitive screen. Not because a stylus was a good way to use a portable device, and not because capacitive touch screen technology was unknown - it was invented long ago. It’s because of cost. You’re just conflating standardization with cost cutting. If there was a cheap and easy to install OS in that era they’d all use it. Oh wait that was DOS & Windows, that was the whole point, that’s what happened, it was adopted because 999/1,000 vendors are interested in cost cutting not innovation. It’s hard to celebrate cost cutters. History never celebrates the crummy cost cutters. I feel no nostalgia for that.

madhadron 6y ago
> Not because a stylus was a good way to use a portable device I personally love using a stylus, have have back to my old Palm Pilot days.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  Resistive digitizers also didn't freak and and refuse to function at all if your fingers were sightly damp. Hence why you'll see a lot of point-of-sale systems in bars using resistive digitizers for their displays.

simonh 6y ago

I think the issue is that, from a user perspective, the implementation details of the kernel and base OS doesn’t matter. As long as it’s sanely implemented and doesn’t impose onerous limitations, it should just get out of the way. The vendor can implement it however they like, with whatever technologies they like, and as long as it supports featureful applications users shouldn’t need to care. The reason Unix was so successful was precisely because it was simple and portable a d designed to get out of the way. It was as unremarkable as possible, by design. All the interesting stuff is left to application developers. You want to implement a relational file system, go ahead. You want to develop your own GUI layer, fine. Compared to the other major OSes of the day like VMS, Pick, PrimeOS, etc it’s as unoppinionated as possible. Likewise with C, which is intended to be as low level and paradigmless as they could. Just an abstraction over assembler just as Unix is a thin abstraction over the hardware.

alexisread 6y ago

I think there have been many missed opportunities in computing, however I'd suggest that the Internet and GPL (open source licencing in general) would have come regardless of the diversity of operating systems. Both these two innovations have really bound the software world together - compatability these days is really at the TCP level (eg. docker and APIs) and allows for a massive diversity of architectures (kafka, istio, materialize.io, IFTTT, Macrometa etc) - the bar has moved in a way. Having said that, some of the missed opportunities of note are: MINT: Gem and Tos weren't really developed much by Atari, but they did buy in MINT which has preemptive multi tasking and memory protection. With the Aes being retargetable (graphic cards), gdos vector fonts and postscript printing, tcp and lan networking stacks, shell, global shortcut system, posix compatibility and multi-user capabilities, it managed to evolve Tos to effectively a unix with usable desktop aka a standard OSX or linux-on-the-desktop well before now. Secondly, choosing A2 instead of Android would have been huge. A compiled multithreaded, multitasking self-hosted OS with GC, zooming UI, 3x faster than Linux and small enough for one person to understand (250k kernel). https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/147091/eth-26082-02.pdf https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.... One other benefit here would have been no Google-Oracle lawsuit to mess with API copyright :)

kmeisthax 6y ago
Oracle v. Google would have happened eventually. The underlying problem is the law, not the litigants. In any other field that deals with copyright, the idea that copyright protection extends to what is effectively a series of headings and summaries would be obvious. The problem is that copyright is a poor fit for software - our headings and summaries carry function to them, and changing them breaks code. In general, the law doesn't want to grant copyright over purely functional things, or even things where functionality and creativity are frustratingly mixed. That's why boat hulls and hardware have separate ownership regimes - copyright over them was explicitly rejected. But we also explicitly said software is copyrightable, which leaves open the question of where the unprotected function ends and the protected creativity starts. Maybe in the world where Android never happened, some other company stumbled upon this rich vein of confusion, and we're dealing with SCO/Novell/Attachmate/Whoever v. Apple over who can implement UNIX APIs in their kernels.

jl6 6y ago

This is the way of the world in microcosm. When globalization has smeared all cultures together, and the only languages left are English, Spanish, and Mandarin, the world will be far more interoperable - but at the cost of every other independent niche society. I’m not actually saying it’s not worth it.

tasogare 6y ago
The idea that English (in this case Spanish and Mandarin as well) will kill all other languages is debious and forget a very important fact: through most of history and in a lot of places bilingualism is the norm. Current examples are some African countries where languages local are spoken and French is used as vehicular language; Standard Chinese while people speak another Sinitic language. What is likely to happen is more people being proficient in a second or even third languages (like it is in Hong Kong).

pvg 6y ago

The incompatibilities just moved to different places, where the focus of development and competition is. Taken collectively, the various core services of mobile devices, desktop OS's and browsers interoperate very poorly across vendors. Think about stuff like identity, auth, sync; even very basic cases - e.g. user using a couple of Apple devices one of which is a macOS laptop where they run Chrome - are an incomprehensible mess of incompatibility to most non-nerd users.