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Choice quotes from ast: > 5 years from now [1992 -> 1997] everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5 > My point is that writing a

Choice quotes from ast: > 5 years from now [1992 -> 1997] everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5 > My point is that writing a new operating system that is closely tied to any particular piece of hardware, especially a weird one like the Intel line, is basically wrong.

arethuza 12y ago
In the 1980s there was often an assumption that "all the world's a VAX" - in the 1990s there was often an equivalent assumption that "all the world's a Sun".
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  Just a few years ago, "all the world were an Intel/AMD". We are just starting with the "all the world's an ARM" mindset. Some things never change.
bhaak 12y ago
The second quote continues with "An OS itself should be easily portable to new hardware platforms". The 1.0 release in 1994 only supported i386 machines. Only after considerable efforts and changes to the code Linux got ported to different platforms with 1.2 and AFAIK even the port to 68k and PowerPC for 2.0 needed again quite some work. So, history proved him right. ;-) Of course, Linus didn't intend to write a portable OS but only one for AT clones. Maybe Tanenbaum didn't foresee that Linux would jump across to that many different platforms that it eventually did but with his experience he probably already saw the possible need to port it to newer machines if Linux would be useful for some people.
- waps 12y ago
  Tanenbaum is an academic. The ivory tower got (and gets) the microkernel debate wrong. Microkernels are a "better architecture" and that, to them, justifies performance levels that are abysmal. It took them decades to get it working in the first place, and again this is not seen as a problem. This is how academia works. For a long time: micro kernels were universally perceived as better despite never having seen a working one despite the few attempts at a working kernel could not run basic programs, never mind a decent interface despite every successful kernel ever being monolithic (exception, to some extent, is QNX) and of course these messages were posted from machines that ran ... monolithic kernels And of course : they admitted to using their power to force people "the right way" in this debate. Both ast and tanenbaum point out that they'd deduct points/fail students who took the wrong stance. (presumably, of course, they'd also fire any phd students who do the same) Please keep this in mind next time you hear that academics widely support idea X. Think of academia like a hell of a lot of climate debates, except with the protagonists' positions usually not very well supported, or outright contradicted by the real world. Or even worse : the position is a choice, with no real argument one way or the other, with a strict hierarchy between people, and the higher ups very willing to abuse their power. It took me a long time to get out of academia, and out of this madness. I wrote papers, dissertations, and here's how that plays out "Good boy ! +1 (not in pay of course). Publish. Copy to the library. Now put it in the trash and work on something else" (I had failed papers too, of course). Let's just say that this is far from the only debate that works this way. There's many other things, like in programming languages, (extreme) static typing, (pure) funcional programming, dependent typing, garbage collection, rpc interfaces, object databases, machine learning nonsense, ... Barring other information, I have realized, a good bet is this : if >70% of the academic researchers are on the same side for any particular claim, bet against that claim, just for that reason alone. And get out of academia, of course. Google, facebook, yahoo, microsoft, ... all are building large machine learning teams with actual resources, by far the best researchers in the world, people who demand actual results on some problems (yes, that's a plus), and continuity. there is an extreme obsession with learning algorithms in academia. The whole thing is a worthless waste of time, for one simple reason : feature engineering can make k-means beat the crap out of the most advanced algorithm anyone's ever come up with. But new learning algorithms are much easier to write, much smaller to prove things about, and thus much, much easier to get a phd dissertation through a committee with. In practice "deep learning" is by far the most successful algorithm (which is another way to say running a 1963 algorithm at scale)
  - axaxs 12y ago
    > Both ast and tanenbaum point out that they'd deduct points/fail I agree with your post completely, but you do realize ast is Tanenbaum, right?
userbinator 12y ago
That first quote is funny when you look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#Timeline_of_instructions_per_second http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#Timelin... > Intel Pentium Pro 541 MIPS at 200 MHz ... 1996 Also this list of benchmarks suggests a SPARCstation5 was either slower or roughtly the same performance as the 1st-generation Pentiums (which came out in '93, only a year after that post): http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?11079-Sun-Sparcstation5-is-it-worth-it http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?11079... But this was definitely a time when betting on RISC-based desktops seemed like a good idea.
- bluedino 12y ago
  Low-end Sun hardware wasn't exactly fast. When the Pentium came out the gap between RISC workstations and commodity Intel desktops really started to shrink
- Rusky 12y ago
  Even better is that x86 started translating its instruction set into an internal RISC-like set, so RISC kind of won anyway.
  - mcv 12y ago
    RISC didn't "kind of" win; it really won, due to everybody walking around with tiny RISC computers in their pockets. Running a variety of linux.
    - Joeri 12y ago
      Even the tiny windows computers are RISC machines. Windows NT also dates back to somewhere around 92 and made hardware independence a big deal. Dave Cutler had to fight tooth and nail to keep it in while lots if people were telling him to just build it for Intel.
    - Rusky 12y ago
      The important difference between traditional RISC and what we have now in either x86 or ARM is the instruction encoding. You have to have a compact instruction encoding or you waste memory bandwidth. That's part of why x86 eventually beat the old RISC designs and that why ARM has the Thumb encodings.

arethuza 12y ago

In the 1980s there was often an assumption that "all the world's a VAX" - in the 1990s there was often an equivalent assumption that "all the world's a Sun".

marcosdumay 12y ago
Just a few years ago, "all the world were an Intel/AMD". We are just starting with the "all the world's an ARM" mindset. Some things never change.

bhaak 12y ago

The second quote continues with "An OS itself should be easily portable to new hardware platforms". The 1.0 release in 1994 only supported i386 machines. Only after considerable efforts and changes to the code Linux got ported to different platforms with 1.2 and AFAIK even the port to 68k and PowerPC for 2.0 needed again quite some work. So, history proved him right. ;-) Of course, Linus didn't intend to write a portable OS but only one for AT clones. Maybe Tanenbaum didn't foresee that Linux would jump across to that many different platforms that it eventually did but with his experience he probably already saw the possible need to port it to newer machines if Linux would be useful for some people.

waps 12y ago
Tanenbaum is an academic. The ivory tower got (and gets) the microkernel debate wrong. Microkernels are a "better architecture" and that, to them, justifies performance levels that are abysmal. It took them decades to get it working in the first place, and again this is not seen as a problem. This is how academia works. For a long time: micro kernels were universally perceived as better despite never having seen a working one despite the few attempts at a working kernel could not run basic programs, never mind a decent interface despite every successful kernel ever being monolithic (exception, to some extent, is QNX) and of course these messages were posted from machines that ran ... monolithic kernels And of course : they admitted to using their power to force people "the right way" in this debate. Both ast and tanenbaum point out that they'd deduct points/fail students who took the wrong stance. (presumably, of course, they'd also fire any phd students who do the same) Please keep this in mind next time you hear that academics widely support idea X. Think of academia like a hell of a lot of climate debates, except with the protagonists' positions usually not very well supported, or outright contradicted by the real world. Or even worse : the position is a choice, with no real argument one way or the other, with a strict hierarchy between people, and the higher ups very willing to abuse their power. It took me a long time to get out of academia, and out of this madness. I wrote papers, dissertations, and here's how that plays out "Good boy ! +1 (not in pay of course). Publish. Copy to the library. Now put it in the trash and work on something else" (I had failed papers too, of course). Let's just say that this is far from the only debate that works this way. There's many other things, like in programming languages, (extreme) static typing, (pure) funcional programming, dependent typing, garbage collection, rpc interfaces, object databases, machine learning nonsense, ... Barring other information, I have realized, a good bet is this : if >70% of the academic researchers are on the same side for any particular claim, bet against that claim, just for that reason alone. And get out of academia, of course. Google, facebook, yahoo, microsoft, ... all are building large machine learning teams with actual resources, by far the best researchers in the world, people who demand actual results on some problems (yes, that's a plus), and continuity. there is an extreme obsession with learning algorithms in academia. The whole thing is a worthless waste of time, for one simple reason : feature engineering can make k-means beat the crap out of the most advanced algorithm anyone's ever come up with. But new learning algorithms are much easier to write, much smaller to prove things about, and thus much, much easier to get a phd dissertation through a committee with. In practice "deep learning" is by far the most successful algorithm (which is another way to say running a 1963 algorithm at scale)
- axaxs 12y ago
  > Both ast and tanenbaum point out that they'd deduct points/fail I agree with your post completely, but you do realize ast is Tanenbaum, right?

userbinator 12y ago

That first quote is funny when you look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#Timeline_of_instructions_per_second http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#Timelin... > Intel Pentium Pro 541 MIPS at 200 MHz ... 1996 Also this list of benchmarks suggests a SPARCstation5 was either slower or roughtly the same performance as the 1st-generation Pentiums (which came out in '93, only a year after that post): http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?11079-Sun-Sparcstation5-is-it-worth-it http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?11079... But this was definitely a time when betting on RISC-based desktops seemed like a good idea.

bluedino 12y ago
Low-end Sun hardware wasn't exactly fast. When the Pentium came out the gap between RISC workstations and commodity Intel desktops really started to shrink
Rusky 12y ago
Even better is that x86 started translating its instruction set into an internal RISC-like set, so RISC kind of won anyway.
- mcv 12y ago
  RISC didn't "kind of" win; it really won, due to everybody walking around with tiny RISC computers in their pockets. Running a variety of linux.
  - Joeri 12y ago
    Even the tiny windows computers are RISC machines. Windows NT also dates back to somewhere around 92 and made hardware independence a big deal. Dave Cutler had to fight tooth and nail to keep it in while lots if people were telling him to just build it for Intel.
  - Rusky 12y ago
    The important difference between traditional RISC and what we have now in either x86 or ARM is the instruction encoding. You have to have a compact instruction encoding or you waste memory bandwidth. That's part of why x86 eventually beat the old RISC designs and that why ARM has the Thumb encodings.