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I wasn't alive during the period of IBM dominance, but I have a certain romantic view of it. The rapid advancement of technology by leaps and bounds, the abilit

I wasn't alive during the period of IBM dominance, but I have a certain romantic view of it. The rapid advancement of technology by leaps and bounds, the ability of a single person to write operating systems and compilers at the seat of a terminal, even the branding and design is something I associate with the heart of computing. Ok, maybe I'm more in love with Bell Labs than IBM, but there's a part of me that wishes I could have been there and experienced the age of the terminal and the beginnings of the PC. My generation will probably never experience the same magic. We've reached the end of Moore's law and each year brings uninspired iterations on the major successes of the past. We're born with smart phones in our hands, it's something that we've never not known, and that destroys our ability to appreciate its value. By the way, if anyone wants to recommend some good late 1970s/1980s fonts, keyboard reproductions, wallpapers, etc. I'm really into collecting those things. I use IBM Plex Mono quite a bit already.

klelatti 5y ago
The diversity of different systems was fun - there was so much scope for improvement and it wasn’t clear who was going to win. You might enjoy browsing some of the old Byte magazines on the internet archive which give quite a good feeling for the era.
int0x2e 5y ago
When I first learned about OS internals I felt the save way. All the cool stuff has been done. All the good ideas were discovered many years ago. If only I was born 20 years earlier... But actually, there has been a lot of progress since then. There were plenty of cool ideas and innovations being made. It's true that it may not all be ground breaking, but the actual rate of innovation is increasing, not decreasing... Just think about what your phone can do. It's amazing.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yeah there's still a lot happening. On the other hand, the modern smartphone is really only a bit over 10 years old in terms of mainstream impact and there probably hasn't been anything else in the tech space that's so directly had a major impact on consumers since. (Probably the Web before that and the PC before that--to a lesser degree.)
  - digisign 5y ago
    There's still a lot of work needed to bring a FLOSS smartphone up to speed.
zmgsabst 5y ago
Quantum computers and quantum AI are the next architecture/paradigm revolution with that feel. We know there’s some quantum accelerated AI work, eg by Microsoft — and we’ve seen increased quantum and photonic circuits. China has demonstrated light table and distributed quantum computing, so we know it “scales”. But we’re not quite sure which of many approaches will get it from bench top to “working” — much less who will be dominant in a decade. Quantum accelerated AI is that revolution in our time.

klelatti 5y ago

The diversity of different systems was fun - there was so much scope for improvement and it wasn’t clear who was going to win. You might enjoy browsing some of the old Byte magazines on the internet archive which give quite a good feeling for the era.

int0x2e 5y ago

When I first learned about OS internals I felt the save way. All the cool stuff has been done. All the good ideas were discovered many years ago. If only I was born 20 years earlier... But actually, there has been a lot of progress since then. There were plenty of cool ideas and innovations being made. It's true that it may not all be ground breaking, but the actual rate of innovation is increasing, not decreasing... Just think about what your phone can do. It's amazing.

ghaff 5y ago
Yeah there's still a lot happening. On the other hand, the modern smartphone is really only a bit over 10 years old in terms of mainstream impact and there probably hasn't been anything else in the tech space that's so directly had a major impact on consumers since. (Probably the Web before that and the PC before that--to a lesser degree.)
- digisign 5y ago
  There's still a lot of work needed to bring a FLOSS smartphone up to speed.

zmgsabst 5y ago

Quantum computers and quantum AI are the next architecture/paradigm revolution with that feel. We know there’s some quantum accelerated AI work, eg by Microsoft — and we’ve seen increased quantum and photonic circuits. China has demonstrated light table and distributed quantum computing, so we know it “scales”. But we’re not quite sure which of many approaches will get it from bench top to “working” — much less who will be dominant in a decade. Quantum accelerated AI is that revolution in our time.