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What have we lost? [video]
- ArtWomb 6y agoThis talk looks pretty epic. I'm glad this discussion is being injected into the mainstream. I wish every one had an opportunity to use a network computing environment such as MIT Athena once in their lives. The original plan wasn't simply to grant blanket licenses for science and simulation software to users in the academic community. But create a true edtech platform that could be used to learn anything: languages, design, entrepreneurship, etc.
- sk5t 6y agoAFS, Zephyr, Kerberos, BatMail in emacs--all mind-expanding stuff to me way back when!
- Jtsummers 6y agoI never really explored AFS sufficiently to understand why this was the case, but I was always surprised it (or a similar mechanism) was not available in corporate offices. "Clear everything off of SharePoint you don't need, we're running out of room." "The shared drive is full, we're going to purge everything not in one of the special directories. See the list." AFS, as used at my university in the 00s, nicely reduced this problem by greatly expanding the amount of storage capacity available. It also helped speed up access to data by moving it to the system you were working on (assuming it was also an AFS node and not your personal device, in which case it was exactly like accessing a remote disk). It also helped with the "SharePoint is down again because even though we're a multibillion dollar corporation we're too cheap to hire real IT staff and Bob the Build Engineer tasked with keeping it up is on vacation." Local copies of data remained accessible.
- Ologn 6y ago> I was always surprised [AFS] (or a similar mechanism) was not available in corporate offices. In some ways it was self-fulfilling - corporate offices didn't use it, so there wasn't a great ecosystem, so corporate offices did not use it. There were a handful of vendors, all with drawbacks. On a large network, AFS, or particular cells or filesystems could get into a weird state. It was not like Solaris NFS where most senior sysadmins understood the filesystem error states. You want to feel you are putting data into something safe, permanent and always accessible, and AFS never felt like that in corporate environments I was in.
- hestefisk 6y agoHaven’t heard AFS mentioned in years. I was co-admin of a SunSITE back in the early 2000s and we used AFS for mirroring. Whilst it was quite neat, it was quite complex, especially due to the underlying intricacies of Kerberos. It would be great to have a more modern version of AFS with its distributed nature, central name spaces etc but with a truly open, horizontally scalable distributed file system.
- thequux 6y agoWe've been talking about doing a follow-on talk this year focusing on network computing environments. Plan 9 and Apollo DomainOS are likely to make appearances, but more ideas are welcome.
- throw36820 6y agoThat's awesome! Looking forward to it. What about the 'PLATO system'? "Long before Facebook's and Google's founders were born, and before Microsoft and Apple were founded. Before Xerox PARC. Before the Web. AOL. Bulletin boards and CompuServe. Before the Internet. Long before MOOCs (massively open online courses). Before pretty much everything we take for granted today, there was the PLATO system: home of not only computer-based education but, surprisingly, the first online community, and the original incubator for social computing: instant messaging, chat rooms, message forums, the world's first online newspaper, interactive fiction, emoticons, animations, virtual goods and virtual economies, a thriving developer community, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), personal publishing, screen savers. PLATO is where flat-panel gas plasma displays come from, and was one of the first systems with touch panels built-in to the screen. Countless other innovations." [1] The book 'The Friendly Orange Glow' by Brian Dear details all about it. He says it's "a book in the works for more than two decades. Based on extensive research, including interviews with hundreds of key individuals who designed, built, managed, sold, and used the PLATO system." [1] http://friendlyorangeglow.com/ http://friendlyorangeglow.com/ PLATO on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) Book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Orange-Glow-Untold-Cyberculture/dp/1101871555 https://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Orange-Glow-Untold-Cybercult...
- jka 6y agoKeyKOS (and relatives) somehow got my attention a little while back, and seem like they might be somewhere in the space of things you'd find interesting. I'm not sure how available/installable they are nowadays, but some of their ideas live on in L4 microkernels, apparently. (enjoying the talk; thanks!)
- vladmk 6y agoWhy mainstream? But yes I agree we definitely should take a hard look at any software biz older than 10 years old
- yellowyacht 6y agoMy university used to have researchers offer to pay students for testing out new OS ideas, such as 3D visualization of file systems. Some ideas looked super brilliant, but I had to look over at the researcher and smile because I didn't know how to use it. Neither would my grandmother. Sometimes the simplest ideas win.
- weswpg 6y ago> 3D visualization of file systems > I didn't know how to use it Skateboard around thorough virtual file systems like "Plague" in the movie Hackers[1][2] [1] https://youtu.be/kV_i8AefT8I https://youtu.be/kV_i8AefT8I [2] https://youtu.be/LkqKFamTkME https://youtu.be/LkqKFamTkME
- squarefoot 6y agoAn actual working implementation was psdoom, in which one could visualize processes in the Doom game environment, then wander around killing them :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSpHc945G38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSpHc945G38
- runeks 6y agoDid we really “lose” the Lisp Machine, or did we just realize that compiling Lisp to a general-purpose instruction set like x86 and then having someone else in charge of creating hardware to efficiently execute that is much more clever?
- ori_b 6y agoWe lost the environment where the whole OS was a debugger, and everything could be inspected and modified as the system was running.
- zabzonk 6y agoWe still have Smalltalk.
- abzug 6y agoI know what you are meaning but in reality we don't have.
- jcelerier 6y agoyet there are likely an order of magnitude more smalltalk programmers today than there were at smalltalk's "peak"
- spillguard 6y agoI'd be curious to know how you quantified this. I was curious myself, so I dug into where Smalltalk landed in Stack Overflow's developer survey (which, of course, is not a complete overview of the entire programming industry!) - it seems that Smalltalk was the second most Loved language in 2017 [0], but it completely disappears off the chart in 2018 [1]. I would imagine that we've lost quite a few Smalltalk programmers... [0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017 [1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018
- albertzeyer 6y agoOn Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RNbIEJvjUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RNbIEJvjUA (The media.ccc.de server was a bit slow for me.)
- cuillevel3 6y agoMost mirrors are in Germany: https://cdn.media.ccc.de/events/rc3/h264-hd/rc3-r3s-20-eng-What_have_we_lost_hd.mp4?mirrorlist https://cdn.media.ccc.de/events/rc3/h264-hd/rc3-r3s-20-eng-W...
- albertzeyer 6y agoYes, but I'm actually located in Germany myself. I assumed that there was just too much traffic caused by HN.
- 7373737373 6y agoRelevant: "Why KeyKOS is fascinating" - https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41 https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41
- js8 6y agoInteresting.. it somewhat ties to what people are doing in programming languages with linear/affine types, representing resources that can be passed around but not duplicated.
- cecja 6y agoWe lost a lot with sun even quirky ui/ux ideas like looking glass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXv8VlpoK_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXv8VlpoK_g
- CodeArtisan 6y agoSmalltalk Pharo is like these OS: an environment where everything is an object that you can inspect, modify, duplicate, ... Here a demo with a minesweeper clone i once made to discover Pharo: https://files.catbox.moe/jggff7.webm https://files.catbox.moe/jggff7.webm It was really amazing but i didn't went further than that; Using Pharo quickly felt like being on a secluded island. More about Pharo: https://pharo.org/features https://pharo.org/features
- thequux 6y agoI was actually going to do a segment on Pharo, because it really does fit in with the theme, but time limitations prevented it. If you found the stuff in the talk interesting, I second the recommendation to check it out.
- turbinerneiter 6y agoI feel like dbus and systems built around it (i.e. Gnome) are at least a glimpse at that.
- rhn_mk1 6y agoHow does it compare? d-bus is just an inter-process communication mechanism, houw would it bring us closer to copying a Minesweeper window?
- turbinerneiter 6y agoA tiny, tiny glimpse. It's a bit more than IPC, it's a discoverable object system. Very far away from copying UI elements.
- jamexcb 6y agoAS 400 is still going strong for many companies!
- hestefisk 6y agoIndeed. A lot of banks overhauled their core banking platforms to run on IBM i in the early to mid 90ies. It scales well and considered secure.
- hestefisk 6y agoI’m curious about the IBM i. Anyone here who can comment on how to get started? You can’t exactly buy one of these systems off the shelf.
- artificialLimbs 6y agoGet in touch with a 3rd party vendor. They can offer classes/training or point you to someone who can. You could also take a look at IBM's redbooks. They're guides written by 3rd parties. http://redbooks.ibm.com/ http://redbooks.ibm.com/ And here are the IBM technical docs: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en https://www.ibm.com/docs/en You can get used IBM Power servers on ebay, but they're pretty pricey. Not sure about licensing and such also, so you should look into that before buying.
- thequux 6y agoThere's an IBM i hobbyist discord[1] full of friendly people who will be happy to help you out with learning or acquiring your own iron, or you can use any of a number of public-access systems. The main public access system is pub400[2], but there are at least three that are run by people in the discord. I run one of them, albeit with the worst uptime of the bunch; PM for details. And finally, you can find all of the docs for the system on IBM's site[3], though they can take some getting used to. [1] https://discord.gg/MzYzSvzN https://discord.gg/MzYzSvzN, or #ibmi on freenode [2] https://pub400.com/ https://pub400.com/ [3] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_73/rzahg/welcome.htm https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_73/rza...
- 6y ago
- atsmyles 6y agoLarry Masinter gave a presentatation recently about Interlisp. https://youtu.be/x6-b_hazcyk https://youtu.be/x6-b_hazcyk
- XnoiVeX 6y agoWhat else comes to my mind: OS/2 Warp, NeXT OS, SGI IRIX
- pjmlp 6y agoNeXTSTEP is pretty much alive.
- Koshkin 6y agoFor some definitions of ‘alive.’
- pjmlp 6y agomacOS still uses Objective-C, and in spite of Swift love, some key frameworks (like Metal) make use of it. The new C++ userspace drivers is called DriverKit, most likely in homage to NeXT Objective-C based DriverKit. DisplayPoscript has evolved into PDF. WebObjects has transitioned to a Java based framework, that is only used by Apple, and was the basis for J2EE design. Other than that even less people used NeXT for servers than workstations. EOF evolved into CoreData. If you want Renderman it is still available. The UNIX underpinnins never really mattered, in a MIcrosoft kind of way, its main purpose was to bring UNIX software into NeXTSTEP and be a checkpoint on contracts. So for me it is pretty much alive.
- tristor 6y agoI still miss Warp. It was actually a pretty great OS. BeOS was fantastic as well.
- js8 6y agoI was recently thinking a bit about how one could create a typed Forth-like system, by adding a 3rd parallel stack that would hold the type on the data stack, and was used for type checking. I really wanted to like Forth (which is very similar to Lisp/Smalltalk systems, even possibly more elegant in some respects), because of the system extensibility, but the stack errors drove me crazy. So if the system had the ability to show the types of things on the stack (or name them) while programming, that would be a big help. Such Forth seems to be surprisingly close to Haskell (or other lambda calculus like language), which I really enjoy lately (I wouldn't go back to Lisp), but written in reverse.
- thequux 6y agoThat sounds really cool, and I'd love to see the result if/when you build it
- vidarh 6y agoA third stack is one more thing to keep track of. The simpler solution to this in many languages is type tagging. E.g. Ruby (MRI at least) uses a few bits to indicate type to avoid creating full-blown objects for small-ish integers, symbols, etc., and you'll find the same approach in many strongly typed dynamic languages.
- js8 6y agoI think you misunderstand. The 3rd stack would be parallel to data stack, and would be used during interpretation for dynamic type checking (and also completion), or during compilation to do static type checking (and also type inference).
- vidarh 6y agoI got that. The point I was making is that type tagging is an alternative to this that saves you from keeping the extra stack in sync, as well as avoids sacrificing another register as a stack pointer. It's also well trodden ground in the form of tagged unions of various forms going back at least to ALGOL 68 so there's plenty of literature on the subject.
- artificialLimbs 6y agoSeems like IBM's problem with iSeries is that they aren't encouraging new usage. They aren't working with universities to offer students any kind of courses, and don't seem to care whether or not the system is adopted. Not sure how sustainable it is, even considering the positive qualities of the system (security and simplicity of command structure, for example).
- rml 6y agoIf you are into Lisp Machines, this talk on Symbolics by Kalman Reti (who worked there) is worth watching (1h): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBfB2MJw3qg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBfB2MJw3qg If you only have 15 minutes, he gives another demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk He has another video where he does some actual hacking (smooth scrolling of sheet music for display while playing an instrument): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfgjL7EUHZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfgjL7EUHZ8
- anthk 6y agoRiscOS and Rox Desktop under BSD/Linux.
- CyberDildonics 6y agoReinventing QNX will be cutting edge for decades.