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I feel like this sentence holds the key to the author’s misunderstanding of things: > This is as good as it gets: a 50 year old OS, 30 year old text editors, a
by pbourke 6y ago
I feel like this sentence holds the key to the author’s misunderstanding of things:
> This is as good as it gets: a 50 year old OS, 30 year old text editors, and 25 year old languages. Bullshit. No technology has ever been permanent.
Many successful software technologies are Ships of Theseus, where the collection of things with version N bears the same name as the version 1 product but nearly everything works differently or has been rewritten. Consider Modern C++ vs the original language.
Also the author just kind of ignores the whole Cloud Computing industry and virtualization.
- worik 6y agoI agree with your conclusion, disagree with your argument. Especially the last one. Cloud computiung was the first sort of computing available, widely, from the 1950s. Central systems which were accessed with terminals. A huge business up until the 1980s, at least. Virtualisation dates from the 1980s, at the latest. I had a professor in the early 1990s who had worked on it for Amdahl
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoI still then feel like the author's argument would basically be like "aviation has stagnated in the past 100 years!" because planes existed in 1920 and we're still flying in planes in 2020.
- Leherenn 6y agoIt's not that wrong though, you could certainly argue that not much has changed since roughly the end of WW2 and "mainstream" oceanic crossings. The de Havilland Comet was introduced in 1949 and is very similar to modern jetliners. The only thing that would shock a traveler from 70 years ago is the awful service and in flight entertainment system.
- jacquesm 6y agoAnd for someone who flew Concorde it probably looks like we did a step backwards.
- pfdietz 6y agoWhat that shows is how misleading the wrong metrics can be.
- worik 6y ago> The only thing that would shock a traveler from 70 years ago is the awful service and in flight entertainment system. ...and the cheapness
- easton 6y agoShoot, virtualization was a thing on System/370 in the early 70s!
- randomsearch 6y agoCloud computing is only superficially comparable to mainframe computing. They’re both centralised, that’s pretty much it.
- TheCoelacanth 6y agoThe remote access part is similar, but in some ways 1950s systems were as far from cloud computing as possible. 1950s - computers are so expensive that I can't even get one to myself and have to share it with a bunch of other people now - I'm using so many computers that I can't even handle managing them all myself and instead pay Amazon to do it for me