18 ms·

What have we lost? – Demo of exotic OSes (2021) [video]

309 points by manoDev 4y ago

chizhik-pyzhik 4y ago
I particularly enjoyed the demo of BTRON starting around 27:10... interesting seeing a system update, for example, provided as an object that you drag from the installation document into the system settings window.
- smm11 4y ago
  Holy cow! BTRON is awesome. It's like the gaslight home-lighting era, in the modern day. A web browser?
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Yeah, and it has a BeOS feel to it.
- avidphantasm 4y ago
  This makes me mourn Apple’s failure to develop a next-generation OS in-house (as much as I like many things about the NeXT-based modern macOS).
anyfoo 4y ago
IBM i opened my eyes a bit, and made me a bit sad, when I decided to check it out after decades of working on what I now realize are entirely UNIX-y OSes. By that I mean that besides the many actual UNIX-derived systems like Linux, Solaris, HP/UX, macOS I worked on, IBM i made me realize that DOS, Windows, OS/2, and whatever else most people are probably aware of nowadays, are also UNIX clones to a much higher degree than I thought. IBM i is completely different in many ways. It has a unified 128bit address space. It does not have the same concept of a hierarchical filesystem (by default, you can bolt one on, but it clearly does not "fit"), and it does not even strongly have the concept of having everything in "streaming" files (or their equivalent) to begin with. It also has a completely different "command line" concept for example, and countless other aspects that are hard to explain succinctly. It is a bit like learning Haskell, where it used to feel like you thought you could learn every language in an afternoon (after C, C++, Java, JS, Pascal, perl, python, awk, shells, BASIC, and countless others), but then discover you have to relearn the very basics, and that what you thought of as universal actually isn't. A lot of these concepts work really well. They are at a level of abstraction that I would not have thought possible in practice. They allow the system to be incredibly stable and low maintenance, and elegant. The underlying architecture was changed at least once (maybe twice, not sure), and it was entirely seamless for customers. It made me sad because I discovered a computing world that could be widespread reality, but in all likelihood won't be. That's thanks to UNIX being so pervasive that it's now basically woven into the very fabric of computing, but that is of course in no small part thanks to IBM's extreme closeness. I once thought UNIX was the way to go, but I'm not so sure anymore. And now that it's everywhere, too many of its concepts are considered a "ground truth". UNIX won because it was hard to avoid getting exposed to it, while for IBM i you had and still have to fight for even just trying it out. Interestingly, the IBM mainframe world, i.e. z/OS and its predecessors, do feel the same in terms of "you have to relearn everything", but with the opposite outcome. Where IBM i is presenting you with unique abstractions from the very base of the OS, it's amazing how little abstraction there is in the mainframe world. You clearly get a sense that mainframes come from a time where a lot of common concepts simply had not been invented yet, while on the other hand IBM i (or rather its predecessors) reimagined OSes at a much later time.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I've worked on old IBM systems (old by today's standards, back then they were top of the line), the 4381 to be specific, it ran very fast (the IO capabilities of those systems was quite impressive for the time and even today such a system would, besides it size be quite ok) compared to all of the UNIX machines I had played with but it wasn't elegant in the way that UNIX was, just tons and tons of little details to remember, whereas with the UNIX survival guide (about 15 commands) you could normally get through the day until you started to do crazy stuff. The IBM gear cam with absolutely amazing documentation though. "everything is a file" is brilliant, but UNIX didn't take that as far as it should have, Plan 9 is much further along that road and I would consider it to be even more elegant than UNIX. The way in which things work is just like you would expect them to work, including being able to compose stuff (for instance: in Plan 9 to run a new version of the window manager in a window in the old one) is what I really like about that particular system. Between Plan 9 and Erlang we missed a bus somewhere.
  - anyfoo 4y ago
    Be careful though, IBM 4381 is an example of the mainframe world, so very much not similar to IBM i. It's s/370 compatible and ran OS/VS1 and VM/370. In terms of abstraction, almost the opposite in some sense, as I've noted in my last paragraph. In terms of usage as well: IBM i's command line model I also mentioned helps a lot in using the system even without external documentation (more than the UNIX shell does), which seems to be the opposite in the mainframe world.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Yes, that's true it is a completely different beast from IBM i. By the way, I'm not sure if you have just used these remote or virtualized or in person but they are quite impressive from a hardware perspective and built incredibly solid compared to almost everything else that I've worked with including VAXen from that era. We had two of them (cold spare...) maxed out Group 2 models. That's still 'only' 32 MB of RAM which may seem tiny by today's standards but that machine happily served a few hundred branch offices of a fairly major bank all by its lonesome, so that's 1000's of concurrent users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS).
thequux 4y ago
I'm glad that this talk continues to inspire people! FWIW, there's previous discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26723886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26723886
- mintplant 4y ago
  Did you end up giving the follow-on talk mentioned here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26724786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26724786
  - thequux 4y ago
    I did not; unfortunately, my mental health took a dive in 2021 and I couldn't gather the energy to write another talk. I still intend to continue the series at some point, though.
    - emikulic 4y ago
      Sorry to hear it, man. :( I hope you get better.
- dang 4y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: What have we lost? [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26723886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26723886 - April 2021 (83 comments)
trasz 4y ago
This book might be of use: http://www.snee.com/bob/opsys/fullbook.pdf http://www.snee.com/bob/opsys/fullbook.pdf
wudangmonk 4y ago
I guess the only hope for seeing new non-toy OSes would be when hardware manufacturers move to a SoC and create a spec for it.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  And that will still very much resemble most of today's OSes not only because that's what people know, but also because the development kit will need to run on common OSes, so the paradigms still have to be somewhat compatible.
- gman83 4y ago
  There's SerenityOS -- https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/ One of the main authors has been documenting the development on YouTube, it's pretty fascinating.
  - dmd 4y ago
    SerenityOS, by design, is close to indistinguishable from any other unix.
- snvzz 4y ago
  There's a lot going on, actually. I wouldn't dare call seL4, haiku, genode or managarm toys.
- boondaburrah 4y ago
  I think the only SoC that's close is the one that comes on the Raspberry Pi 1-3, since they even got broadcom to release the docs for the VideoCore IV GPU. It's still not completely documented, but it's better than most "Here's the docs for the basic I/O peripherals but we only provide closed drivers for Linux" SoCs. Otherwise there's still just the regular old x86 PC everyone has lurking in their modern PC.
jcynix 4y ago
Oh, yes, Symbolics Genera, loved it, miss it. And miss the keyboard with its control, meta, super and hyper keys. I actually do have one keyboard in my archive of things (aka "stuff" ;-), but I have no idea how to interface it to modern hardware, sigh.
- floren 4y ago
  Odds are it would be extremely easy with, say, an Arduino Pro Micro. I've interfaced a variety of old hardware (Sun Type 5 keyboard, Depraz mouse, original Macintosh mouse) via USB using one. You're probably more or less on your own in terms of figuring it out, though, because not many people have those keyboards!
  - jcynix 4y ago
    > You're probably more or less on your own in terms of figuring it out [...] Sure, but as I'm not a good hardware tinkerer, ... but maybe I should visit some local self-repair community group and learn. Symbolics produced a nubus(?) coprocessor with their Ivory chip in their final days, which used a box to interface the keyboard to Apple's ADB, but I never got hold of either the coprocesor nor the box.
    - floren 4y ago
      You might start with https://trmm.net/Symbolics/ https://trmm.net/Symbolics/ which seems to be pretty much ready-to-go with an Arduino. If you're in the Bay Area, I would build the adapter for you just to have the opportunity to check out a Symbolics keyboard first-hand :)
- linguae 4y ago
  My dream is for Symbolics Genera to become open source, though I'd be satisfied if hobbyist licenses for the DEC Alpha port were available at a reasonable price. Another dream that I have is to actually use a Symbolics Lisp machine; I've only seen screenshots of Genera and demos on Youtube. I was born near the end of the 1980s AI boom, and thus the only time I've seen a Lisp machine in person was at a trip to the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley nearly six years ago. I'd love to buy one, except Symbolics Lisp machines are very rare, and when they occasionally show up on eBay, they are well beyond what I can afford. Even if I could afford one, I don't have enough room in my apartment for one, though a backup option that is workable (though still very expensive) is to purchase a MacIvory card and a compatible 68k Macintosh.
protomyth 4y ago
Well, given that I am typing this about 15' from an IBM POWER S914 running the i operating system, I'm not sure its lost. Our accountants hate GUI stuff and love the green screen. Its amazing to have what essentially is a low maintenance machine that calls IBM when something isn't correct. We have the last i Series (a pre-POWER model) that lasted for over a decade, and I do expect this one to make it the same amount of time. It is a bit obtuse, but I dearly wish some other OSes would examine themselves for self administration to the level of the IBM i Series.
- avhception 4y ago
  As late as 2011, we had a custom payroll system on MS-DOS. I was always blown away by the speed it's users achieved. They really flew through the menus and knew all hotkeys and commands of the TUI by heart. When they got "upgraded" to a modern GUI based system, it really slowed them down. Of course learning a new thing always takes time, but that's not the whole story. Especially with ever-changing websites that usually don't care about hotkeys, the mental load of visually scanning for elements and clicking them with the mouse can be really slow. And it always fascinates me how it was perfectly normal and expected for mere users to use a TUI while today I've heard grunts even from junior devs and self-proclaimed power-users when I told them to use the CLI for this or that. How times have changed. IBM i is fascinating, and in a world of ever-changing tech-stacks I sometimes yearn for a stable environment where you don't have to fight with 10,000 node.js dependencies every other month just to keep that payroll website going. I've never came in contact with IBM i or POWER tech in a professional capacity, but have purchased an RS/6000 and, more recently, a TalosII system to play around with ppc64le :)
  - john61 4y ago
    As a pianist I am not surprised. The keystrokes a TUI requires is like a piece of piano music. You can learn the required keystrokes pretty fast and play it very fast, reliable and unconscious. Image a piano played by touchscreen or mouse.
  - LeftHandPath 4y ago
    I've noticed a lot of the more experienced people in our office stop trusting things as soon as they see drop shadows and branded color schemes. And they are all very quick with the old terminals.
agumonkey 4y ago
next: xerox, pharo, vpri ometa based os, oberon, and emacs
jamesfmilne 4y ago
I caught a glimpse of operating systems that had not been and would never be
cf100clunk 4y ago
Alternative link to video: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=7RNbIEJvjUA https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=7RNbIEJvjUA
jbverschoor 4y ago
Well, proper "objects". So many great things in the 90s on windows btw..
jcadam 4y ago
The only older OS I actually miss is Amiga Workbench. I had an older coworker at one of my first jobs who would go on and on about VMS all day and how UNIX sucks. I never used VMS so I wouldn't know :)
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  I started learning c on workbench. It was very good. When we "upgraded" to a 386 I was pretty disappointed. Edit: vms was used for my college's firewall/gateway. It was fine. I've used it professionally as well. I don't recall anything that stood out about it.
- EvanAnderson 4y ago
  I still miss the Workbench CLI feature that allowed you to change directory by just entering the directory name.
  - akx 4y ago
    You might want to try an alternative shell for your CLI. E.g. `fish` (https://fishshell.com/ https://fishshell.com/) does that.
  - michaelcampbell 4y ago
    That's an option in `zsh`. setopt auto_cd
jtvjan 4y ago
You can also watch this on their own website if you don't want to deal with YouTube: https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost
mmh0000 4y ago
For those that like playing with arcane commands and systems; check out "Plan 9 from User Space"[0]. A port of Plan9's default applications that runs on Linux or MacOSX. ACME[1], a text editor, is a great starting point. [0] https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/ https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/ [1] http://acme.cat-v.org/ http://acme.cat-v.org/
- lproven 4y ago
  I would prefer to see the other way round: A Unix-WINE for Plan 9, so we could run legacy Linux apps on a more modern OS. And never forget: Plan 9 was just a stage and not the end of the developmental line. That was Inferno. Plan 9 abstracts the network away into the filesystem. Inferno does all that too and abstracts away CPU architectures as well, so the same compiled binary runs on x86 and ARM and RISC-V and whatever you happen to have.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Check vmx under 9front for amd64. It's like KVM for plan9. https://9lab.org/plan9/virtualisation/ https://9lab.org/plan9/virtualisation/ On Linuxemu, you need 9front for i386.
    - lproven 4y ago
      Thanks for the info. I was aware of them, but a VM isn't what I meant. WINE isn't a VM or an emulator: it "just" translates Win32 API calls to Linux ones. Getting that working has required implementing a load of DLLs and things, but it works surprisingly well now. An environment to let Linux binaries launch on Plan 9 (or insert preferred derivative here: 9front, Harvey, Jehanne OS, whatever), akin to the Linuxulator in FreeBSD or the Linux Zone on Solaris, would make the OS much more usable.
      - anthk 4y ago
        I know what Wine does, for sure. Linuxemu and BSDemu did that, the same as Linux_compat on free/netbsd or Wine, but with vmx the former emulation it's obsolete. https://fqa.9front.org/fqa8.html#8.7.1 https://fqa.9front.org/fqa8.html#8.7.1 Old and outdated. You might be able to run some statically linked browser from elsewhere. Linuxemu works with i386 ELF binaries, so maybe an Alpine i386 chroot could work.
bombcar 4y ago
Linux has done more to kill exotic OSes than anything Microsoft or Apple has ever done. Because Linux (and you can throw in the BSDs here if you want) is so capable as is, the chance someone will write an OS from scratch is pretty low. They'll much more likely base it off of Linux and go from there, which means that it'll just be another Unix clone. Even things like Fuchsia are heavily influenced by it, and end up feeling "similar". As someone else mentioned, Unix won so hard most everything else is dead; even Windows is very "unix-like" in ways people don't even realize.
- spideymans 4y ago
  > even Windows is very "unix-like" in ways people don't even realize. WSL is a tacit acceptance of UNIX dominance.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Even before that, much of the UI of DOS itself is Unix inspired (DOS even had “files” for certain devices such as PRN and COM) There are VMS-inspired parts also, but even that is somewhat in the Unix sphere of things.
    - q-big 4y ago
      > Even before that, much of the UI of DOS itself is Unix inspired The inspiration rather came from CP/M.
      - p_l 4y ago
        Not exactly - several "killer features" of DOS 2.0 were features inspired by Xenix and which were not present in CP/M, including a /DEV/ directory, the mere concept of hierarchical filesystem and optional use of forward slashes in directory paths - backslashes were introduced because of CP/M legacy in commands
        lproven 4y ago
christkv 4y ago
VMS on the VAX was also a very interesting OS. I got to play with one of the last VAX models for a summer 25 years ago.
ggm 4y ago
I used a "pick" system briefly in 1982/3 timeframe, in Leeds. The guy who was running it was a DB obsessive and was convinced world hunger was going to be solved if the entire department dropped VMS and Unix for Pick. He moved on. Pick didn't solve world hunger. I was also using Norse Data systems with some OS specific to them, which was basically Job Control Language uplifted from cards to a terminal. It sucked. If memory serves me right it had a problem similar to early Tops-10: you could walk down directory trees but there was no "up" function, just 'go back to root' or 'home' -the Unix creation of . and .. as links in the current directory was just phenomenal to me, in terms of simplicity and outcome. From memory, Norse Data moved to a Unix variant. When CP/M ruled the 8086 world, MS-DOS was to some extent "exotic" -That didn't last, nor did CP/M in the end. Burroughs mainframes had the kernel integrated into a CI/CD system: if you entered kernel editable code in an editor with write permission, save and exit went to compile-deploy in a very few steps. KA9Q was pretty much a multi-tasking OS, running "inside" DOS. if you had it on a floppy, you could "run" it on almost any PC, dial up, connect, have TCP/IP and then have your mostly almost asynchronous SMTP process be connected to and receive your email. I had a disgustingly heavy 486 laptop I lugged around the world on a work trip doing this. I wrote nothing to local disk in DOS, I lived in KA9Q. Phil Karn had written the OS we really wanted, inside DOS. Amazing. My main problem was buying the correct Telco approved connector for the modem and wiring it up to plug into my device each time. I don't think RSTS or RTE or any of the different OS which ran on pdp11 were "exotic" at the point they were being put into deployment running radar and missile systems, but they were pretty different to how we view an OS these days. A lot of things in RSTS or George (the OS for UK Mainframes in banking) were uplifted into the future as encapsulated/emulated systems.
- Nursie 4y ago
  > I was also using Norse Data systems with some OS specific to them ... In the mid 00s I had a large set of C source dumped at my desk, absent build-system, and was asked to get it going across a few different OS. I found #ifdefs for a bunch of architectures I'd never even heard of, and #ifdef ND5000 was only resolved when I had a chat with one of the original authors and asked WTF?? A quick look at ndwiki.org (because of course that exists) tells me they had NDIX, which was a custom UNIX, and SINTRAN which might be what you're describing.
29athrowaway 4y ago
Xerox executives were true losers. They had the keys to the future in their hands and wasted their opportunity.
29athrowaway 4y ago
TempleOS has various impressive features. http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/ http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...
- lproven 4y ago
  TempleOS is a hugely impressive one-man project, but it's a standalone OS with no networking. There are other tiny OSes which are FOSS and are much more capable. Oberon is my personal favourite, in terms of how much it does with how little. http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/ http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    There's networking now. https://github.com/minexew/Shrine https://github.com/minexew/Shrine
    - lproven 4y ago
      Wow! That I did not know. Terry Davies left it out intentionally, AFAICR, due to the complete lack of any security in TempleOS. Putting it back in seems a bit irresponsible, but nonetheless, it's impressive.
      - 29athrowaway 4y ago
        Yes, true. But if you are only running TempleOS on a VM, or an old computer, or a Raspberry Pi or something (not sure if it's supported), it should be fine.
- bombcar 4y ago
  RIP Terry. It's things like this that we need more of - and eschewing networking is a great way to work out what you can actually do with a computer. I feel everything just kind of develops until it has a TCP stack and then becomes another "basically just a blob on the internet". That's not even to get into the various things we just assume about networking that are actually just accidents of TCP, IP, or more and more HTTP. Another thing we haven't really dug deep into is the "everything is a file" paradigm which basically has been interpreted as "everything is a text file" - the hatred for binary data runs deep, but binary data is most likely the best for computers. XML, HTML, etc are perhaps NOT the best representation for various complex forms of data that we want to use.
donatj 4y ago
I don’t think people these days realize how interesting pre-X pre-UNIXification MacOS Classic was. Single files often were made of multiple data streams “resource forks”, and this was actually utilized heavily (NTFS has a similar concept but it’s almost never used). Files had “creator codes” as metadata rather than file extensions. They were directly and firmly associated with the application that created them rather than a description of their content. Files in and of themselves were a very different concept in MacOS Classic. In my eyes a big part of what killed this was the Internet. To the Internet, a file is clearly only a single stream of data. Files are typed by content via mime and file extension, not what created it. Anything with resource forks need to be bundled in a .sit file. This is clearly inconvenient, and made MacOS files second-class citizens. Mind you, resource fork still exist in macOS today, they’re just used for custom icons, tags and file comments. Metadata. Nothing to the extent that MacOS Classic used them for, and all things users don’t mind losing on uploading to the web. - https://www.macintoshrepository.org/articles/152-what-is-a-sit-stuffit-file-and-how-to-use-it- https://www.macintoshrepository.org/articles/152-what-is-a-s...
- jstimpfle 4y ago
  Sounds like a layering issue to me. We have enough problems with semantic differences between filesystems on different platforms - permission models, allowed characters in names etc. What is a strong reason why the multiple streams shouldn't just be implemented on top of a single-stream filesystem file abstraction? I know a number of formats that do such a thing, like ELF, PDF, Sqlite3, various media containers, various archive formats.. Probably some people here can come up with dozens without looking anything up. If you do these resource streams, how do you copy those to various other mediums, like physical drives, tapes, pipes, sockets... All consist only of a single stream at a low level, because why make it harder than that? Now that means that instead of "cat" your standard way to read such a multi stream file would be a command that serializes it to the "sit" format as you mentioned, making that format almost the canonical representation. So what was he point of implementing these resoure forks in the filesystem again? Critizicing Unix often comes back to the "reinventing poorly" phrase, the simplicity of not having some features at every layer is a virtue.
  - 4y ago
WillAdams 4y ago
The high-water mark of my graphical computer experience was using NeXTstep on a Cube paired w/ an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint when away from my desk.
jamesfisher 4y ago
Skip the boring intro: https://youtu.be/7RNbIEJvjUA?t=395 https://youtu.be/7RNbIEJvjUA?t=395
hulitu 4y ago
I miss Apollo's Domain OS. I was schocked what could be done with a 20 MHz processor and 4 Megs of RAM.

309 points by manoDev 4y ago

I particularly enjoyed the demo of BTRON starting around 27:10... interesting seeing a system update, for example, provided as an object that you drag from the installation document into the system settings window.

smm11 4y ago
Holy cow! BTRON is awesome. It's like the gaslight home-lighting era, in the modern day. A web browser?
agumonkey 4y ago
Yeah, and it has a BeOS feel to it.
avidphantasm 4y ago
This makes me mourn Apple’s failure to develop a next-generation OS in-house (as much as I like many things about the NeXT-based modern macOS).

anyfoo 4y ago

IBM i opened my eyes a bit, and made me a bit sad, when I decided to check it out after decades of working on what I now realize are entirely UNIX-y OSes. By that I mean that besides the many actual UNIX-derived systems like Linux, Solaris, HP/UX, macOS I worked on, IBM i made me realize that DOS, Windows, OS/2, and whatever else most people are probably aware of nowadays, are also UNIX clones to a much higher degree than I thought. IBM i is completely different in many ways. It has a unified 128bit address space. It does not have the same concept of a hierarchical filesystem (by default, you can bolt one on, but it clearly does not "fit"), and it does not even strongly have the concept of having everything in "streaming" files (or their equivalent) to begin with. It also has a completely different "command line" concept for example, and countless other aspects that are hard to explain succinctly. It is a bit like learning Haskell, where it used to feel like you thought you could learn every language in an afternoon (after C, C++, Java, JS, Pascal, perl, python, awk, shells, BASIC, and countless others), but then discover you have to relearn the very basics, and that what you thought of as universal actually isn't. A lot of these concepts work really well. They are at a level of abstraction that I would not have thought possible in practice. They allow the system to be incredibly stable and low maintenance, and elegant. The underlying architecture was changed at least once (maybe twice, not sure), and it was entirely seamless for customers. It made me sad because I discovered a computing world that could be widespread reality, but in all likelihood won't be. That's thanks to UNIX being so pervasive that it's now basically woven into the very fabric of computing, but that is of course in no small part thanks to IBM's extreme closeness. I once thought UNIX was the way to go, but I'm not so sure anymore. And now that it's everywhere, too many of its concepts are considered a "ground truth". UNIX won because it was hard to avoid getting exposed to it, while for IBM i you had and still have to fight for even just trying it out. Interestingly, the IBM mainframe world, i.e. z/OS and its predecessors, do feel the same in terms of "you have to relearn everything", but with the opposite outcome. Where IBM i is presenting you with unique abstractions from the very base of the OS, it's amazing how little abstraction there is in the mainframe world. You clearly get a sense that mainframes come from a time where a lot of common concepts simply had not been invented yet, while on the other hand IBM i (or rather its predecessors) reimagined OSes at a much later time.

jacquesm 4y ago
I've worked on old IBM systems (old by today's standards, back then they were top of the line), the 4381 to be specific, it ran very fast (the IO capabilities of those systems was quite impressive for the time and even today such a system would, besides it size be quite ok) compared to all of the UNIX machines I had played with but it wasn't elegant in the way that UNIX was, just tons and tons of little details to remember, whereas with the UNIX survival guide (about 15 commands) you could normally get through the day until you started to do crazy stuff. The IBM gear cam with absolutely amazing documentation though. "everything is a file" is brilliant, but UNIX didn't take that as far as it should have, Plan 9 is much further along that road and I would consider it to be even more elegant than UNIX. The way in which things work is just like you would expect them to work, including being able to compose stuff (for instance: in Plan 9 to run a new version of the window manager in a window in the old one) is what I really like about that particular system. Between Plan 9 and Erlang we missed a bus somewhere.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  Be careful though, IBM 4381 is an example of the mainframe world, so very much not similar to IBM i. It's s/370 compatible and ran OS/VS1 and VM/370. In terms of abstraction, almost the opposite in some sense, as I've noted in my last paragraph. In terms of usage as well: IBM i's command line model I also mentioned helps a lot in using the system even without external documentation (more than the UNIX shell does), which seems to be the opposite in the mainframe world.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Yes, that's true it is a completely different beast from IBM i. By the way, I'm not sure if you have just used these remote or virtualized or in person but they are quite impressive from a hardware perspective and built incredibly solid compared to almost everything else that I've worked with including VAXen from that era. We had two of them (cold spare...) maxed out Group 2 models. That's still 'only' 32 MB of RAM which may seem tiny by today's standards but that machine happily served a few hundred branch offices of a fairly major bank all by its lonesome, so that's 1000's of concurrent users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS).

thequux 4y ago

I'm glad that this talk continues to inspire people! FWIW, there's previous discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26723886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26723886

mintplant 4y ago
Did you end up giving the follow-on talk mentioned here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26724786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26724786
- thequux 4y ago
  I did not; unfortunately, my mental health took a dive in 2021 and I couldn't gather the energy to write another talk. I still intend to continue the series at some point, though.
  - emikulic 4y ago
    Sorry to hear it, man. :( I hope you get better.
dang 4y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: What have we lost? [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26723886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26723886 - April 2021 (83 comments)

trasz 4y ago

This book might be of use: http://www.snee.com/bob/opsys/fullbook.pdf http://www.snee.com/bob/opsys/fullbook.pdf

wudangmonk 4y ago

I guess the only hope for seeing new non-toy OSes would be when hardware manufacturers move to a SoC and create a spec for it.

anyfoo 4y ago
And that will still very much resemble most of today's OSes not only because that's what people know, but also because the development kit will need to run on common OSes, so the paradigms still have to be somewhat compatible.
gman83 4y ago
There's SerenityOS -- https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/ One of the main authors has been documenting the development on YouTube, it's pretty fascinating.
- dmd 4y ago
  SerenityOS, by design, is close to indistinguishable from any other unix.
snvzz 4y ago
There's a lot going on, actually. I wouldn't dare call seL4, haiku, genode or managarm toys.
boondaburrah 4y ago
I think the only SoC that's close is the one that comes on the Raspberry Pi 1-3, since they even got broadcom to release the docs for the VideoCore IV GPU. It's still not completely documented, but it's better than most "Here's the docs for the basic I/O peripherals but we only provide closed drivers for Linux" SoCs. Otherwise there's still just the regular old x86 PC everyone has lurking in their modern PC.

jcynix 4y ago

Oh, yes, Symbolics Genera, loved it, miss it. And miss the keyboard with its control, meta, super and hyper keys. I actually do have one keyboard in my archive of things (aka "stuff" ;-), but I have no idea how to interface it to modern hardware, sigh.

floren 4y ago
Odds are it would be extremely easy with, say, an Arduino Pro Micro. I've interfaced a variety of old hardware (Sun Type 5 keyboard, Depraz mouse, original Macintosh mouse) via USB using one. You're probably more or less on your own in terms of figuring it out, though, because not many people have those keyboards!
- jcynix 4y ago
  > You're probably more or less on your own in terms of figuring it out [...] Sure, but as I'm not a good hardware tinkerer, ... but maybe I should visit some local self-repair community group and learn. Symbolics produced a nubus(?) coprocessor with their Ivory chip in their final days, which used a box to interface the keyboard to Apple's ADB, but I never got hold of either the coprocesor nor the box.
  - floren 4y ago
    You might start with https://trmm.net/Symbolics/ https://trmm.net/Symbolics/ which seems to be pretty much ready-to-go with an Arduino. If you're in the Bay Area, I would build the adapter for you just to have the opportunity to check out a Symbolics keyboard first-hand :)
linguae 4y ago
My dream is for Symbolics Genera to become open source, though I'd be satisfied if hobbyist licenses for the DEC Alpha port were available at a reasonable price. Another dream that I have is to actually use a Symbolics Lisp machine; I've only seen screenshots of Genera and demos on Youtube. I was born near the end of the 1980s AI boom, and thus the only time I've seen a Lisp machine in person was at a trip to the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley nearly six years ago. I'd love to buy one, except Symbolics Lisp machines are very rare, and when they occasionally show up on eBay, they are well beyond what I can afford. Even if I could afford one, I don't have enough room in my apartment for one, though a backup option that is workable (though still very expensive) is to purchase a MacIvory card and a compatible 68k Macintosh.

protomyth 4y ago

Well, given that I am typing this about 15' from an IBM POWER S914 running the i operating system, I'm not sure its lost. Our accountants hate GUI stuff and love the green screen. Its amazing to have what essentially is a low maintenance machine that calls IBM when something isn't correct. We have the last i Series (a pre-POWER model) that lasted for over a decade, and I do expect this one to make it the same amount of time. It is a bit obtuse, but I dearly wish some other OSes would examine themselves for self administration to the level of the IBM i Series.

avhception 4y ago
As late as 2011, we had a custom payroll system on MS-DOS. I was always blown away by the speed it's users achieved. They really flew through the menus and knew all hotkeys and commands of the TUI by heart. When they got "upgraded" to a modern GUI based system, it really slowed them down. Of course learning a new thing always takes time, but that's not the whole story. Especially with ever-changing websites that usually don't care about hotkeys, the mental load of visually scanning for elements and clicking them with the mouse can be really slow. And it always fascinates me how it was perfectly normal and expected for mere users to use a TUI while today I've heard grunts even from junior devs and self-proclaimed power-users when I told them to use the CLI for this or that. How times have changed. IBM i is fascinating, and in a world of ever-changing tech-stacks I sometimes yearn for a stable environment where you don't have to fight with 10,000 node.js dependencies every other month just to keep that payroll website going. I've never came in contact with IBM i or POWER tech in a professional capacity, but have purchased an RS/6000 and, more recently, a TalosII system to play around with ppc64le :)
- john61 4y ago
  As a pianist I am not surprised. The keystrokes a TUI requires is like a piece of piano music. You can learn the required keystrokes pretty fast and play it very fast, reliable and unconscious. Image a piano played by touchscreen or mouse.
- LeftHandPath 4y ago
  I've noticed a lot of the more experienced people in our office stop trusting things as soon as they see drop shadows and branded color schemes. And they are all very quick with the old terminals.

agumonkey 4y ago

next: xerox, pharo, vpri ometa based os, oberon, and emacs

jamesfmilne 4y ago

I caught a glimpse of operating systems that had not been and would never be

cf100clunk 4y ago

Alternative link to video: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=7RNbIEJvjUA https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=7RNbIEJvjUA

jbverschoor 4y ago

Well, proper "objects". So many great things in the 90s on windows btw..

jcadam 4y ago

The only older OS I actually miss is Amiga Workbench. I had an older coworker at one of my first jobs who would go on and on about VMS all day and how UNIX sucks. I never used VMS so I wouldn't know :)

galangalalgol 4y ago
I started learning c on workbench. It was very good. When we "upgraded" to a 386 I was pretty disappointed. Edit: vms was used for my college's firewall/gateway. It was fine. I've used it professionally as well. I don't recall anything that stood out about it.
EvanAnderson 4y ago
I still miss the Workbench CLI feature that allowed you to change directory by just entering the directory name.
- akx 4y ago
  You might want to try an alternative shell for your CLI. E.g. `fish` (https://fishshell.com/ https://fishshell.com/) does that.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  That's an option in `zsh`. setopt auto_cd

jtvjan 4y ago

You can also watch this on their own website if you don't want to deal with YouTube: https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost

mmh0000 4y ago

For those that like playing with arcane commands and systems; check out "Plan 9 from User Space"[0]. A port of Plan9's default applications that runs on Linux or MacOSX. ACME[1], a text editor, is a great starting point. [0] https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/ https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/ [1] http://acme.cat-v.org/ http://acme.cat-v.org/

lproven 4y ago
I would prefer to see the other way round: A Unix-WINE for Plan 9, so we could run legacy Linux apps on a more modern OS. And never forget: Plan 9 was just a stage and not the end of the developmental line. That was Inferno. Plan 9 abstracts the network away into the filesystem. Inferno does all that too and abstracts away CPU architectures as well, so the same compiled binary runs on x86 and ARM and RISC-V and whatever you happen to have.
- anthk 4y ago
  Check vmx under 9front for amd64. It's like KVM for plan9. https://9lab.org/plan9/virtualisation/ https://9lab.org/plan9/virtualisation/ On Linuxemu, you need 9front for i386.
  - lproven 4y ago
    Thanks for the info. I was aware of them, but a VM isn't what I meant. WINE isn't a VM or an emulator: it "just" translates Win32 API calls to Linux ones. Getting that working has required implementing a load of DLLs and things, but it works surprisingly well now. An environment to let Linux binaries launch on Plan 9 (or insert preferred derivative here: 9front, Harvey, Jehanne OS, whatever), akin to the Linuxulator in FreeBSD or the Linux Zone on Solaris, would make the OS much more usable.
    - anthk 4y ago
      I know what Wine does, for sure. Linuxemu and BSDemu did that, the same as Linux_compat on free/netbsd or Wine, but with vmx the former emulation it's obsolete. https://fqa.9front.org/fqa8.html#8.7.1 https://fqa.9front.org/fqa8.html#8.7.1 Old and outdated. You might be able to run some statically linked browser from elsewhere. Linuxemu works with i386 ELF binaries, so maybe an Alpine i386 chroot could work.

bombcar 4y ago

Linux has done more to kill exotic OSes than anything Microsoft or Apple has ever done. Because Linux (and you can throw in the BSDs here if you want) is so capable as is, the chance someone will write an OS from scratch is pretty low. They'll much more likely base it off of Linux and go from there, which means that it'll just be another Unix clone. Even things like Fuchsia are heavily influenced by it, and end up feeling "similar". As someone else mentioned, Unix won so hard most everything else is dead; even Windows is very "unix-like" in ways people don't even realize.

spideymans 4y ago
> even Windows is very "unix-like" in ways people don't even realize. WSL is a tacit acceptance of UNIX dominance.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Even before that, much of the UI of DOS itself is Unix inspired (DOS even had “files” for certain devices such as PRN and COM) There are VMS-inspired parts also, but even that is somewhat in the Unix sphere of things.
  - q-big 4y ago
    > Even before that, much of the UI of DOS itself is Unix inspired The inspiration rather came from CP/M.
    - p_l 4y ago
      Not exactly - several "killer features" of DOS 2.0 were features inspired by Xenix and which were not present in CP/M, including a /DEV/ directory, the mere concept of hierarchical filesystem and optional use of forward slashes in directory paths - backslashes were introduced because of CP/M legacy in commands
      - lproven 4y ago

christkv 4y ago

VMS on the VAX was also a very interesting OS. I got to play with one of the last VAX models for a summer 25 years ago.

ggm 4y ago

I used a "pick" system briefly in 1982/3 timeframe, in Leeds. The guy who was running it was a DB obsessive and was convinced world hunger was going to be solved if the entire department dropped VMS and Unix for Pick. He moved on. Pick didn't solve world hunger. I was also using Norse Data systems with some OS specific to them, which was basically Job Control Language uplifted from cards to a terminal. It sucked. If memory serves me right it had a problem similar to early Tops-10: you could walk down directory trees but there was no "up" function, just 'go back to root' or 'home' -the Unix creation of . and .. as links in the current directory was just phenomenal to me, in terms of simplicity and outcome. From memory, Norse Data moved to a Unix variant. When CP/M ruled the 8086 world, MS-DOS was to some extent "exotic" -That didn't last, nor did CP/M in the end. Burroughs mainframes had the kernel integrated into a CI/CD system: if you entered kernel editable code in an editor with write permission, save and exit went to compile-deploy in a very few steps. KA9Q was pretty much a multi-tasking OS, running "inside" DOS. if you had it on a floppy, you could "run" it on almost any PC, dial up, connect, have TCP/IP and then have your mostly almost asynchronous SMTP process be connected to and receive your email. I had a disgustingly heavy 486 laptop I lugged around the world on a work trip doing this. I wrote nothing to local disk in DOS, I lived in KA9Q. Phil Karn had written the OS we really wanted, inside DOS. Amazing. My main problem was buying the correct Telco approved connector for the modem and wiring it up to plug into my device each time. I don't think RSTS or RTE or any of the different OS which ran on pdp11 were "exotic" at the point they were being put into deployment running radar and missile systems, but they were pretty different to how we view an OS these days. A lot of things in RSTS or George (the OS for UK Mainframes in banking) were uplifted into the future as encapsulated/emulated systems.

Nursie 4y ago
> I was also using Norse Data systems with some OS specific to them ... In the mid 00s I had a large set of C source dumped at my desk, absent build-system, and was asked to get it going across a few different OS. I found #ifdefs for a bunch of architectures I'd never even heard of, and #ifdef ND5000 was only resolved when I had a chat with one of the original authors and asked WTF?? A quick look at ndwiki.org (because of course that exists) tells me they had NDIX, which was a custom UNIX, and SINTRAN which might be what you're describing.

29athrowaway 4y ago

Xerox executives were true losers. They had the keys to the future in their hands and wasted their opportunity.

29athrowaway 4y ago

TempleOS has various impressive features. http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/ http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...

lproven 4y ago
TempleOS is a hugely impressive one-man project, but it's a standalone OS with no networking. There are other tiny OSes which are FOSS and are much more capable. Oberon is my personal favourite, in terms of how much it does with how little. http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/ http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  There's networking now. https://github.com/minexew/Shrine https://github.com/minexew/Shrine
  - lproven 4y ago
    Wow! That I did not know. Terry Davies left it out intentionally, AFAICR, due to the complete lack of any security in TempleOS. Putting it back in seems a bit irresponsible, but nonetheless, it's impressive.
    - 29athrowaway 4y ago
      Yes, true. But if you are only running TempleOS on a VM, or an old computer, or a Raspberry Pi or something (not sure if it's supported), it should be fine.
bombcar 4y ago
RIP Terry. It's things like this that we need more of - and eschewing networking is a great way to work out what you can actually do with a computer. I feel everything just kind of develops until it has a TCP stack and then becomes another "basically just a blob on the internet". That's not even to get into the various things we just assume about networking that are actually just accidents of TCP, IP, or more and more HTTP. Another thing we haven't really dug deep into is the "everything is a file" paradigm which basically has been interpreted as "everything is a text file" - the hatred for binary data runs deep, but binary data is most likely the best for computers. XML, HTML, etc are perhaps NOT the best representation for various complex forms of data that we want to use.

donatj 4y ago

I don’t think people these days realize how interesting pre-X pre-UNIXification MacOS Classic was. Single files often were made of multiple data streams “resource forks”, and this was actually utilized heavily (NTFS has a similar concept but it’s almost never used). Files had “creator codes” as metadata rather than file extensions. They were directly and firmly associated with the application that created them rather than a description of their content. Files in and of themselves were a very different concept in MacOS Classic. In my eyes a big part of what killed this was the Internet. To the Internet, a file is clearly only a single stream of data. Files are typed by content via mime and file extension, not what created it. Anything with resource forks need to be bundled in a .sit file. This is clearly inconvenient, and made MacOS files second-class citizens. Mind you, resource fork still exist in macOS today, they’re just used for custom icons, tags and file comments. Metadata. Nothing to the extent that MacOS Classic used them for, and all things users don’t mind losing on uploading to the web. - https://www.macintoshrepository.org/articles/152-what-is-a-sit-stuffit-file-and-how-to-use-it- https://www.macintoshrepository.org/articles/152-what-is-a-s...

jstimpfle 4y ago
Sounds like a layering issue to me. We have enough problems with semantic differences between filesystems on different platforms - permission models, allowed characters in names etc. What is a strong reason why the multiple streams shouldn't just be implemented on top of a single-stream filesystem file abstraction? I know a number of formats that do such a thing, like ELF, PDF, Sqlite3, various media containers, various archive formats.. Probably some people here can come up with dozens without looking anything up. If you do these resource streams, how do you copy those to various other mediums, like physical drives, tapes, pipes, sockets... All consist only of a single stream at a low level, because why make it harder than that? Now that means that instead of "cat" your standard way to read such a multi stream file would be a command that serializes it to the "sit" format as you mentioned, making that format almost the canonical representation. So what was he point of implementing these resoure forks in the filesystem again? Critizicing Unix often comes back to the "reinventing poorly" phrase, the simplicity of not having some features at every layer is a virtue.
- 4y ago

WillAdams 4y ago

The high-water mark of my graphical computer experience was using NeXTstep on a Cube paired w/ an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint when away from my desk.

jamesfisher 4y ago

Skip the boring intro: https://youtu.be/7RNbIEJvjUA?t=395 https://youtu.be/7RNbIEJvjUA?t=395

hulitu 4y ago

I miss Apollo's Domain OS. I was schocked what could be done with a 20 MHz processor and 4 Megs of RAM.