3 ms·
That's what's really stands out to me as foreign in the article - the idea of an entire system consisting of hardware, OS and even applications designed as a un
by brazzy 13y ago
That's what's really stands out to me as foreign in the article - the idea of an entire system consisting of hardware, OS and even applications designed as a unit with no regard for portability, and people considering that a good thing or at least as the normal thing to do.
We've come a long way since then, and in retrospective the most interesting thing about the article may be what it does not mention at all: the IBM PC, released in the previous year, which would go on to establish a mass-market platform where software compatibility became such a strong concern that praise of elegant and innovative hardware details that support a custom OS seem quaint or absurd.
- Taniwha 13y agoexactly, we're still fighting people trying to create closed wall gardens: iOS, windows, macOS's of various flavours, android to a lesser extent, parts of our phones - places where we're allowed to write apps in frameworks that wont run anywhere else but not operating systems. To be fair it's used to be impossible to bring a hardware product to market without an OS and at least one compiler, and there were no portable compilers or operating systems when Burroughs, IBM, DEC et al were starting out - OS's and early compilers were often written in assembly, they just weren't going to be portable, and those walled gardens kept captured customers in the fold, you couldn't escape.