[HN Gopher] What have we lost? - Demo of exotic OSes (2021) [video]
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What have we lost? - Demo of exotic OSes (2021) [video]
Author : hcarvalhoalves
Score : 146 points
Date : 2022-08-25 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| jcynix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| You might start with 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 :)
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Well, proper "objects". So many great things in the 90s on
| windows btw..
| anyfoo wrote:
| 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.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > ... on the other hand IBM i (or rather its predecessors)
| reimagined OSes at a much later time.
|
| Yes. The System/38 - AS/400 - iSeries - IBM i (the lineage)
| resulted from a project called the "Future Systems" project
| which started in the late 1960s and tried to imagine computers
| as appliances, while recognising that hardware was changing
| fast.
|
| Hardware architecture independence, encapsulation of software
| objects, a highly regular, helpful user interface, and minimal
| administration labor were all design goals of that project.
|
| It succeeded too well. User-written programs were stored with
| their "intermediate representation" (think assembler). They
| could be, and were, retranslated automaitcally when moved to a
| new architecture.
|
| Upgrades from a 36-bit processor with 20-bit addressing to a
| 48-bit processor with 32-bit addressing to POWER (64-bit /
| 64-bit) were essentially just a backup and restore[1] for
| customers.
|
| As probably mentioned in the video, the system could be
| configured with a modem and would phone home to IBM if it
| detected a fault.
|
| It was common that after a few years with turnover of
| accounting personnel, offices would not even know that they had
| an iSeries - this is probably still the case.
|
| This lack of mindshare is probably what killed the i. That and
| IBM not wanting to sell it, to protect their mainframe
| business.
|
| ---
|
| 1. On backups: The OS stored a backup history (dates of the
| last 20 or so backups, from memory) with each object. It also
| stored each object's date of creation and the name and serial
| number of the system it was created on, as well as the dates of
| metadata modification (changes to access rights, for instance).
|
| Not surprisingly with all the bookkeeping it was much harder on
| disk drives than IBM's comparable systems. Disk drives that
| lasted for many years when used with a 4300 series (cut-down
| mainframe) tended to die in 18 months used with the System/38.
| RAID-1 and RAID-3 (2 stripes plus a dedicated parity drive) was
| implemented in the early 80s, from memory. RAID-5 came a bit
| later IIRC.
|
| Programs and files were objects. So were user profils and group
| profiles. Access control lists, objects that contained lists of
| users and groups and permission lists for each entry, were used
| to control access rights to other objects. They themselves were
| objects at the same level as these - created, manipulated, and
| backed up in just the same way.
|
| It tried out a lot of things. It had a unified concept of
| "message queues". There were permanent ones like the QSYSOPR
| (system operator) queue, the equivalent of syslog. Processes
| each got a message queue. Programs within a process each got a
| message queue, so a program could tell its grandparent
| something and continue. As a programmer you could create your
| own message queues, the analog of named pipes in Unix. Message
| templates were predefined and stored in "message files", which
| allowed you to write "second level text" --esentially detailed
| help--for each message. The shell's built-in command prompting
| and menu system was built around message files and queues as
| well.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Exactly my experience when delving into the computer library at
| the university.
|
| I was heading into some UNIX zealotry path, and then started
| diving into everything that happened before UNIX, what was
| going on at Xerox, DEC, Olivetti, ETHZ, and so forth, sunddenly
| UNIX wasn't that interesting as I once thought.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| topspin wrote:
| > "everything is a file" is brilliant, but UNIX didn't take
| that as far as it should have
|
| Agreed. The interface between applications and the operating
| system is not sufficiently abstracted. If it were software
| would be vastly better; faster, more secure, easier to
| manage, scale, migrate, troubleshoot, etc.
|
| There is a lot of attention paid to programming language
| design and too little paid to the environment in which
| software has to operate. I think the low hanging fruit is
| improving operating systems and their abstractions. Solving
| this at the programming language level is not feasible; all
| that produces is a virtual machine that adds overhead,
| complexity and valueless diversity.
| anyfoo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| I never used the i series (formerly AS/400, and System/38
| before that), but reading _Inside the AS /400_ by Frank G.
| Soltis made a huge impression on me. Highly recommended for
| anyone interested in the details.
| whartung wrote:
| I kind of wished I would have got a position at some company
| to work on an AS/400. Back in the day, my company was looking
| for a new "solution" and considered most everything,
| including an IBM. But eventually we went UNIX.
|
| What I'm curious, though, is in the world of a random back
| office developer, how much of the, well, "inner beauty" of
| the machine would I have encountered.
|
| Most of the cool Unix-y stuff happened mostly through ad hoc
| integrations with random Stuff as circumstances presented
| themselves, and I don't know how much of the AS/400 a random
| (likely) COBOL programmer would have delved into.
| anyfoo wrote:
| If you'd like to try, there is a way to get a free user
| account at pub400.com. That got me interested enough that I
| set out to get my own AS/400.
|
| It took me literally years until I stumbled upon an
| affordable machine with licenses. The machine I got is
| decades old and was decommissioned in 2008, after a long
| life.
|
| IBM created something revolutionary and did everything to
| keep the public away from it.
| chiph wrote:
| The team behind it also tried to keep the rest of IBM away
| from it, for fear that The Suits From Armonk would come in
| and ruin their product and their culture.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Never worked on IBM i, but Wang VS had a very unique system. It
| also expected the terminals connected to it to have a small
| CPU.
|
| Too bad it never made it to the wild. In its last days it was
| ported to an IBM AIX System (RS6000?), but the company went
| bankrupt before that port made it out.
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Holy cow! BTRON is awesome. It's like the gaslight home-
| lighting era, in the modern day. A web browser?
| agumonkey wrote:
| Yeah, and it has a BeOS feel to it.
| selimnairb wrote:
| 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).
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Alternative link to video:
| https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=7RNbIEJvjUA
| bombcar wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| > even Windows is very "unix-like" in ways people don't even
| realize.
|
| WSL is a tacit acceptance of UNIX dominance.
| jcadam wrote:
| 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 :)
| protomyth wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :)
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| The biggest key with the "green screen" terminals is they
| would NEVER EVER lose a keypress and they would buffer them,
| too.
|
| So even if the computer was actually quite slow, if you knew
| what you were doing you could "type ahead" a few screens into
| the system, and then wander off and do something else.
|
| That just doesn't work on GUIs (some rarely are well designed
| so that it can) and certainly has zero chance of working on
| webpages.
| protomyth wrote:
| I honestly wish someone had come up with some text markup
| language and "browser" so enterprise developers could
| deploy text UI apps. The web is just awful for the back
| office people. Frankly, I wonder how much money is being
| spent on the web when a TUI would have been more
| productive.
| ordiel wrote:
| Developers of newer versions of a system even if it is a
| migration from TUI to a Web GUI should really strive to
| maintain the shortcuts and hotkeys, an upgrade its suposed to
| be "that", extra functionality not a replacement of the
| existing one. Sadly there is this assumption that given it
| has a GUI there is no need of shortcuts or hotkeys, forcing
| users to use the mouse.
|
| Gmail does provide some hotkeys and I think even those "few"
| ones really help, also Atlassian applications yet most web
| pages I have interacted with have none
| LeftHandPath wrote:
| That's funny - I am currently working on a web app to GUI-ify
| the green screen for my company's IBM i OS on a similar Power8
| system. They love the green screen but this was the easiest way
| to reduce the amount of manual entry we're doing for a specific
| 3rd party application we run on it.
|
| A different tool I made ran in the PASE [1] environment on the
| same system -- compiling & running C++ in IBM's AIX runtime
| environment. Really interesting experience.
|
| [1]: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.3?topic=programming-pase-i
| wslh wrote:
| Sidenote: I just googled about that equipment[1] and found it
| weird that the copywriting says: "IBM(r) Power System S914
| easily integrates into your organization's cloud & cognitive
| strategy and delivers superior price performance for your
| mission critical workloads..." the "cognitive strategy" words
| seems forced by a new marketing team. Cloud also seems weird in
| this context.
|
| [1] https://www.ibm.com/products/power-system-s914
| mmh0000 wrote:
| 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/
|
| [1] http://acme.cat-v.org/
| jtvjan wrote:
| 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
| trasz wrote:
| This book might be of use:
| http://www.snee.com/bob/opsys/fullbook.pdf
| wudangmonk wrote:
| 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.
| gman83 wrote:
| There's SerenityOS -- https://serenityos.org/ One of the main
| authors has been documenting the development on YouTube, it's
| pretty fascinating.
| dmd wrote:
| SerenityOS, by design, is close to indistinguishable from any
| other unix.
| anyfoo wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| next: xerox, pharo, vpri ometa based os, oberon, and emacs
| thequux wrote:
| I'm glad that this talk continues to inspire people!
|
| FWIW, there's previous discussion over here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26723886
| mintplant wrote:
| Did you end up giving the follow-on talk mentioned here?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26724786
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _What have we lost? [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26723886 - April 2021 (83
| comments)
| jamesfmilne wrote:
| I caught a glimpse of operating systems that had not been and
| would never be
| christkv wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2022-08-25 23:00 UTC)