6 ms·

I do miss the diversity of computing from back then. Today everything has converged on looking and acting almost the same, but back then there was so much more

I do miss the diversity of computing from back then. Today everything has converged on looking and acting almost the same, but back then there was so much more choice. Amiga, Atari St, Mac, SGI, Sun, NeXT, and a whole lot more.

ianai 4y ago
Yep. Nowadays a new release is likely to take features or design away or backwards for seemingly the need to be different. Like the many times Microsoft has tried to take away the Start menu. Gnome 2 to 3. Etc. Meanwhile Planet 9 tried to pull off a logical extension of unix only to be abandoned. Some of those ideas live on, but probably not as extensively as P9 would have allowed.
- gonzo 4y ago
  I think you mean “Plan 9”; in case anyone wants to search for it.
  - ianai 4y ago
    Yes sorry, long day.
  - 0des 4y ago
    A subset of us still use plan9, usually in the form of 9front. Every time I think of Plan9, I get a little misty eyed and wistful. I'm just old enough to remembering time sharing systems and mainframes. These days looking at whats called cloud, I'm seeing a lot of the old architecture coming back, loosely speaking. Mobile devices are like the new dumb terminals, the browser is the shell, and the cloud is our mainframe. If you want to extend the analogy further we even pay for time in a convenient monthly subscription, whether that be Netflix's cloud or your favorite remote music service. Circling back to plan9, it really was the ideal system, and for the way things are going these days, it's really only a matter of time before we see the return of Plan9 or something built in effigy of it. I say this with a straight face, from the filesystem to the network model, from top to bottom Plan9 was a new paradigm that extended on the original Unix system in ways we still haven't replicated today in a mainstream environment the way it was then. The way the network layer and system layer intertwined to form an actual everythings-a-file system was bonkers the first time I tried it, coming from the Linux world where this claim is often made and isn't always true. Now that the 9 system is back in the community's hands it's just going to take one group to be the next Inferno, similar to redhat, and put on the suits and ask for money and youll see the rest of the industry start to join in. It might just be my tainted opinion as a Gopher, but we're letting good stuff go to waste, we should be evolving this technology while the creators are still around to give input about their vision. Glenda will ride again, I just hope I'm alive to see it.
    - ianai 4y ago
      I completely agree! What are the features from the front end of P9 that you miss most?
      - 0des 4y ago
        Simplicity (im a TWM guy) also the way that acme is like a emacs from the future in that like the plan9 ui the mouse gets a lot of traffic. You can highlight words and instantiate them as commands, also one of my favorite features is preemptively drawing the space where my window is about to spawn. Also, the color scheme is truly based, as the kids say.
    - ProtoMathics 4y ago
      NEXTgen hardware virtualization + QUBES OS-like usage of virtualization but made nice looking and frictionless to standard user. Thats the future we get.
      - ianai 4y ago
        Yes and which definitely feels like the OS equivalent of “since you all can’t get along on your own you each will be given your own OS-like namespace and have no direct interaction with one another.”
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Ideal only if one doesn't care about high performance graphics or audio, which Plain 9 didn't had anyway.
- ProtoMathics 4y ago
  Plan9 and EMACS have architecture which is antithetic to economic model of todays software industry, so in that sense im glad we did have windows95-like buggy macos (until atleast 10.4-10.5) XD EMACS is essentially SAP+github+Office(including Visio and Power Automate) for your own offcloud usage. If you think about it.
  - ianai 4y ago
    How is it antithetic? Being able to “mount” external compute to a local terminal is a recipe for selling more hardware. I mean both PlayStation and Xbox can be locally streamed to a phone or tablet. Granted, it did take basically 20 years for those suits to come along to the idea. The whole obsolescence through a glued on battery and all the other nastiness of modern mobiles does make a point though. They do want their recurring revenue streams for cloud resources. But that essentially moves the mountable resources to a provider.
pjmlp 4y ago
And everyone took the effort to write proper native applications instead of something like Electron.
- ProtoMathics 4y ago
  convert all JS to "native" via LLVM.... or just webassembly .. programming languages are ONLY communication layers between human and computer, they are not some voodoo, gift from god, so these layers can be made to suit human needs. instead of browser downloading blob from facebook, your package manager will dowload it, and that can be made over P2P (like torrent) because you do not need it in 0.000001 sec. it will sit in cache. and this can be signed with current certification authority ecosystem almost without change to provide safe downloads.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
I miss this too. Both on the software and hardware side. We've lost a lot, though on the other hand computing is more mature now.
the_only_law 4y ago
> I do miss the diversity of computing from back then I’ve thought about this for a while. All sorts of different architectures, companies, protocol, etc. whereas computing seems to be a massive monoculture now. We basically only have a handful of operating systems, most of which are based off something from decades ago, basically only two architectures still succeeded and one of them just seems to be hacks piled on top of hacks, etc. I get that there’s a reason certain stuff won out, but it’s just boring to me personally. Even compared to not that long ago, I look at PC cases from 10-15 years ago and see a ton of cool and unique designs, anything from recent times seems to be reduced to “white or black case with flashy lights”.

ianai 4y ago

Yep. Nowadays a new release is likely to take features or design away or backwards for seemingly the need to be different. Like the many times Microsoft has tried to take away the Start menu. Gnome 2 to 3. Etc. Meanwhile Planet 9 tried to pull off a logical extension of unix only to be abandoned. Some of those ideas live on, but probably not as extensively as P9 would have allowed.

gonzo 4y ago
I think you mean “Plan 9”; in case anyone wants to search for it.
- ianai 4y ago
  Yes sorry, long day.
- 0des 4y ago
  A subset of us still use plan9, usually in the form of 9front. Every time I think of Plan9, I get a little misty eyed and wistful. I'm just old enough to remembering time sharing systems and mainframes. These days looking at whats called cloud, I'm seeing a lot of the old architecture coming back, loosely speaking. Mobile devices are like the new dumb terminals, the browser is the shell, and the cloud is our mainframe. If you want to extend the analogy further we even pay for time in a convenient monthly subscription, whether that be Netflix's cloud or your favorite remote music service. Circling back to plan9, it really was the ideal system, and for the way things are going these days, it's really only a matter of time before we see the return of Plan9 or something built in effigy of it. I say this with a straight face, from the filesystem to the network model, from top to bottom Plan9 was a new paradigm that extended on the original Unix system in ways we still haven't replicated today in a mainstream environment the way it was then. The way the network layer and system layer intertwined to form an actual everythings-a-file system was bonkers the first time I tried it, coming from the Linux world where this claim is often made and isn't always true. Now that the 9 system is back in the community's hands it's just going to take one group to be the next Inferno, similar to redhat, and put on the suits and ask for money and youll see the rest of the industry start to join in. It might just be my tainted opinion as a Gopher, but we're letting good stuff go to waste, we should be evolving this technology while the creators are still around to give input about their vision. Glenda will ride again, I just hope I'm alive to see it.
  - ianai 4y ago
    I completely agree! What are the features from the front end of P9 that you miss most?
    - 0des 4y ago
      Simplicity (im a TWM guy) also the way that acme is like a emacs from the future in that like the plan9 ui the mouse gets a lot of traffic. You can highlight words and instantiate them as commands, also one of my favorite features is preemptively drawing the space where my window is about to spawn. Also, the color scheme is truly based, as the kids say.
  - ProtoMathics 4y ago
    NEXTgen hardware virtualization + QUBES OS-like usage of virtualization but made nice looking and frictionless to standard user. Thats the future we get.
    - ianai 4y ago
      Yes and which definitely feels like the OS equivalent of “since you all can’t get along on your own you each will be given your own OS-like namespace and have no direct interaction with one another.”
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Ideal only if one doesn't care about high performance graphics or audio, which Plain 9 didn't had anyway.
ProtoMathics 4y ago
Plan9 and EMACS have architecture which is antithetic to economic model of todays software industry, so in that sense im glad we did have windows95-like buggy macos (until atleast 10.4-10.5) XD EMACS is essentially SAP+github+Office(including Visio and Power Automate) for your own offcloud usage. If you think about it.
- ianai 4y ago
  How is it antithetic? Being able to “mount” external compute to a local terminal is a recipe for selling more hardware. I mean both PlayStation and Xbox can be locally streamed to a phone or tablet. Granted, it did take basically 20 years for those suits to come along to the idea. The whole obsolescence through a glued on battery and all the other nastiness of modern mobiles does make a point though. They do want their recurring revenue streams for cloud resources. But that essentially moves the mountable resources to a provider.

pjmlp 4y ago

And everyone took the effort to write proper native applications instead of something like Electron.

ProtoMathics 4y ago
convert all JS to "native" via LLVM.... or just webassembly .. programming languages are ONLY communication layers between human and computer, they are not some voodoo, gift from god, so these layers can be made to suit human needs. instead of browser downloading blob from facebook, your package manager will dowload it, and that can be made over P2P (like torrent) because you do not need it in 0.000001 sec. it will sit in cache. and this can be signed with current certification authority ecosystem almost without change to provide safe downloads.

GekkePrutser 4y ago

I miss this too. Both on the software and hardware side. We've lost a lot, though on the other hand computing is more mature now.

the_only_law 4y ago

> I do miss the diversity of computing from back then I’ve thought about this for a while. All sorts of different architectures, companies, protocol, etc. whereas computing seems to be a massive monoculture now. We basically only have a handful of operating systems, most of which are based off something from decades ago, basically only two architectures still succeeded and one of them just seems to be hacks piled on top of hacks, etc. I get that there’s a reason certain stuff won out, but it’s just boring to me personally. Even compared to not that long ago, I look at PC cases from 10-15 years ago and see a ton of cool and unique designs, anything from recent times seems to be reduced to “white or black case with flashy lights”.