4 ms·

I expected more VR. Much more VR. From the perspective of early-90s, I was all-in on Plan 9 and expected to see a lot more influence from it. Unfortunately tha

I expected more VR. Much more VR. From the perspective of early-90s, I was all-in on Plan 9 and expected to see a lot more influence from it. Unfortunately that didn't really happen, with a few exceptions (/proc).

sheenobu 5y ago
With this hindsight, any predictions for the future? 30 years from now?
- haser_au 5y ago
  My prediction is that once the capability reaches contact lenses, it'll become mass adoption. The physicality of wearing a headset while walking or moving is difficult for lots of people, and tiring. Contact lenses weigh a lot less, and are less intrusive to others. Of course, it doesn't come without pitfalls, but that's just my prediction.
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    I think glasses/goggles are less intrusive than contact lenses. Lenses are irritating and difficult to insert. It's also impossible to share contact lenses. I think VR is already pretty close with the Quest 2, to what it needs to be to get mainstream adoption. A little lighter, a little thinner, maybe 5-10 more years of iterative improvements and we'll be there.
    - Insanity 5y ago
      I've been wearing lenses for 15 years and do not think they are difficult to insert or irritating. But it does take some getting used to.
      - chrisco255 5y ago
        I wore lenses for 4 years and couldn't stand it. So I had them blast laser beams into my eyes in an attempt to fix it, so that I never had to wear lenses again. And it worked!
- glangdale 5y ago
  My hindsight also shows me that I trashed the WWW as "yet another system like gopher and WAIS that probably won't amount to much", so I should not be trusted with predicting the future, or even possibly the present.
the_only_law 5y ago
Man I see some really neat concepts in operating systems that were created in the 80s and 90s and somehow we got stuck with a handful of Unix-likes and Windows with small parts of operating systems of the past frankensteined in occasionally.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Rob Pike has a page on this where he laments that Unix-likes and Windows have become the only dominant OSs so OS innovation these days has mostly died. While there certainly is a resurgence of new ideas in OSs like GenodeOS, Fuschia, and others, OS development has slowed down a lot. It makes sense. Every time an OS is rewritten, applications need to make huge fundamental changes to how they work, for little gain for application developers and users. Until there can be a set of incentives to push OS development forward, there won't be much progress.
  - glangdale 5y ago
    Given rob's disdain for academic research and the literature in general, I'm not sure he'd be my go-to guy for analyses about this, but I agree that we don't see the kind of OS research we saw in the 90s. I think a lot of the things we were seeing at the OS level in the early 90s are now feasible to do in user space. That, plus the fact that it is prohibitively hard to talk to devices [1], has reduced the innovation in this area but also moved it elsewhere. Having dealt with the pain of writing OS code, or libraries that have to function in one or more OS's, I can see why people prefer to innovate elsewhere if they possibly can. That being said, there's a lot of possible "systems" work or work that could be described as "operating systems" in the broad sense that isn't in-kernel, and that work seems to have tailed off too. [1] My favorite data point on this, which isn't even one of the more complex devices: back when I TA'ed CMUs "build a preemptive kernel" 15-410 class, the students wrote a kernel that would really boot. We had an old machine for their kernels if they wanted to see things working on a real machine not SIMICS. However, it had to be an old machine with a PS/2 keyboard, as the complexity of talking to a USB keyboard (or so I was told; I never verified this) was roughly equivalent to the "build a entire preemptive multitasking kernel" - and obviously far less pedagogically useful.

sheenobu 5y ago

With this hindsight, any predictions for the future? 30 years from now?

haser_au 5y ago
My prediction is that once the capability reaches contact lenses, it'll become mass adoption. The physicality of wearing a headset while walking or moving is difficult for lots of people, and tiring. Contact lenses weigh a lot less, and are less intrusive to others. Of course, it doesn't come without pitfalls, but that's just my prediction.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  I think glasses/goggles are less intrusive than contact lenses. Lenses are irritating and difficult to insert. It's also impossible to share contact lenses. I think VR is already pretty close with the Quest 2, to what it needs to be to get mainstream adoption. A little lighter, a little thinner, maybe 5-10 more years of iterative improvements and we'll be there.
  - Insanity 5y ago
    I've been wearing lenses for 15 years and do not think they are difficult to insert or irritating. But it does take some getting used to.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      I wore lenses for 4 years and couldn't stand it. So I had them blast laser beams into my eyes in an attempt to fix it, so that I never had to wear lenses again. And it worked!
glangdale 5y ago
My hindsight also shows me that I trashed the WWW as "yet another system like gopher and WAIS that probably won't amount to much", so I should not be trusted with predicting the future, or even possibly the present.

the_only_law 5y ago

Man I see some really neat concepts in operating systems that were created in the 80s and 90s and somehow we got stuck with a handful of Unix-likes and Windows with small parts of operating systems of the past frankensteined in occasionally.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Rob Pike has a page on this where he laments that Unix-likes and Windows have become the only dominant OSs so OS innovation these days has mostly died. While there certainly is a resurgence of new ideas in OSs like GenodeOS, Fuschia, and others, OS development has slowed down a lot. It makes sense. Every time an OS is rewritten, applications need to make huge fundamental changes to how they work, for little gain for application developers and users. Until there can be a set of incentives to push OS development forward, there won't be much progress.
- glangdale 5y ago
  Given rob's disdain for academic research and the literature in general, I'm not sure he'd be my go-to guy for analyses about this, but I agree that we don't see the kind of OS research we saw in the 90s. I think a lot of the things we were seeing at the OS level in the early 90s are now feasible to do in user space. That, plus the fact that it is prohibitively hard to talk to devices [1], has reduced the innovation in this area but also moved it elsewhere. Having dealt with the pain of writing OS code, or libraries that have to function in one or more OS's, I can see why people prefer to innovate elsewhere if they possibly can. That being said, there's a lot of possible "systems" work or work that could be described as "operating systems" in the broad sense that isn't in-kernel, and that work seems to have tailed off too. [1] My favorite data point on this, which isn't even one of the more complex devices: back when I TA'ed CMUs "build a preemptive kernel" 15-410 class, the students wrote a kernel that would really boot. We had an old machine for their kernels if they wanted to see things working on a real machine not SIMICS. However, it had to be an old machine with a PS/2 keyboard, as the complexity of talking to a USB keyboard (or so I was told; I never verified this) was roughly equivalent to the "build a entire preemptive multitasking kernel" - and obviously far less pedagogically useful.