[HN Gopher] If operating systems were beers (1995)
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If operating systems were beers (1995)
Author : shakna
Score : 112 points
Date : 2022-06-13 11:24 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (beerme.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (beerme.com)
| aparticulate wrote:
| Loving all the retro stuff on HN today!
| petee wrote:
| Well if its outdated, lets add some new ones.
|
| OpenBSD would be just can, by default. Beer is your prerogative,
| and available in the ports tree.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I actually heard that alcohol got dropped off the mainline due
| to a lack of maintainers. FreeBSD continues to ship their cans
| half-filled though!
| bstamour wrote:
| They actually ship three different cans - one for each
| firewall in the base install.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Hey, that's already halfway to a six pack! Maybe these BSD
| developers _do_ know what they 're doing, after all...
| ben_bai wrote:
| Hah, it's like "Beer 5,0". Beer that tastes like beer, no
| advertisements, only cans. Don't like it? Drink something else!
| accrual wrote:
| It also ships in a hardened can to make it difficult for others
| to illictly drink your beer.
| agomez314 wrote:
| is the site down?
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| not for me.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Also: When You Write Your Essays in Programming Languages
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.somethingofthatilk....
|
| Another site bites the dust. A gallery of some of the comics, if
| archive.org is slow: https://imgur.com/gallery/mukhL
| anyfoo wrote:
| The discussions here about Windows NT, Netware, and the various
| UNIXes transports me back to my youth when I worked as a
| freelance system/network admin for various small to mid-size
| companies before going to university. What a fun, diverse job
| that was. Very different from what I imagine DevOps to be
| nowadays...
| bombcar wrote:
| It's kind of weird that Linux in a way became what people were
| afraid Windows would - Linux has absolutely crushed and
| destroyed all other OSes so that all that remains on server is
| basically Linux and a small amount of Windows in a bad POSIX
| mustache with a sign around its neck that says "LINUX".
|
| And worldwide we're basically down to three or five OSes:
| Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, depending on how you count
| them. The various "flavors" of Linux are way more similar than
| even old versions of Windows were.
| msla wrote:
| > It's kind of weird that Linux in a way became what people
| were afraid Windows would
|
| The fear surrounding Windows was that a company would own
| computing even more than IBM owned computing in the 1950s:
| Microsoft would be it, every other company would exist at
| Microsoft's sufferance and effectively pay a tax in order to
| be allowed to keep existing, and anything which would
| threaten Microsoft's current business plans would be
| destroyed through a mix of API changes, revocation of
| developer licenses, AARD code-like subterfuge, and, _in
| extremis_ , actual lawsuits.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
|
| Add Palladium on top of that, and PCs are better locked-down
| than cell phones turned out to be:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-
| Generation_Secure_Computi...
| zhte415 wrote:
| Windows 11 beer -
|
| An innovative new taste that reminds some of iOS beer when mixed
| with Windows XP beer. This deafening non-distinctiveness will
| earn it a place in history as an exemplifier of late 2010s style.
| It comes in a 64 oz can which, following earlier experiments with
| square containers, is round again, in fact all corners have been
| completely removed with only one edge remaining. This 64oz can
| can contain unlimited numbers of other 8, 16, 32 and 64 oz cans
| of other beers, and the label comes in all languages except for
| some markets where it doesn't. In the interests of your safe
| drinking and continued loyalty to the beer, the can will stop you
| drinking from it just when you really want to while refilling
| itself with what you hope is not another flavour.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| You really wonder why they bothered calling this an "all new
| beer" when it's really essentially the same beer as their last
| one, just with slightly better looking label and can. It still
| has those weird aftertastes and smells in it that you swear
| were from the Windows95Beer and DOSBeer.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| This person wasn't a Mac user; that entry is both inaccurate and
| uninteresting. If someone with more patience than me would like
| to rewrite it: From the programmer's perspective, the Mac was
| always essentially a 32-bit machine (you could make an argument
| for the early Mac being limited to 24 bits), and the
| "ingredients" were actually very well documented in the early
| Inside Mac volumes; lockdown came later as Apple tried to move
| the application base to a succession of "modern" OSes.
| GrumpyYoungMan wrote:
| Kind of depressing to contrast that with today where there are
| just three deeply entrenched operating systems (phone and
| embedded OSes don't count since the end-user has no meaningful
| access to them). We, or at least I, naively thought we'd see
| continued rapid evolution of a plethora of OSes to accompany the
| rapid evolution of computer hardware.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| We were already seeing that happen back in 95. From that list
| half the operating systems were either deprecated or niche. We
| still have a plethora of niche platforms now from the various
| BSDs, Open Solaris derivatives, Hakiu, ReactOS, and all the
| experimental ones too.
|
| The hardware duopoly was already in full force by 1995. Sure
| Amiga was listed in that article but by 1995 IBM-compatible PCs
| had won and Amiga, Atari, Acorn etc were basically just used by
| a small few enthusiasts or specialist domains.
| kriro wrote:
| I got a good chuckle out of an old "which os are you" quiz (html
| site, pre social media quizzes) where I ended up Gnu/Hurd because
| I forgot to answer one question :D
| Optimal_Persona wrote:
| Windows ME must have been brewed from corn, as on a fresh install
| I'd get a kernel error at least 1 out of 3 boots!
| carldaddy wrote:
| I love these old looking websites.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Reminds me of the "car" dealership comparison in In the Beginning
| was the Command Line:
| https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
|
| and the hilarious "if programming languages were cars" list:
| http://users.cms.caltech.edu/~mvanier/hacking/rants/cars.htm...
| mos_basik wrote:
| > ~mvanier
|
| Wow, did a double take seeing that. I took all of the courses
| he taught at Caltech around 2011-12. Really enjoyed him. Didn't
| expect to see that link on HN.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| For anybody that used to work professionally back in the 90s, I
| want to ask:
|
| Was Windows NT a good OS? My professor in University was a
| hardcore Linux fan, but he used to praise NT saying it was the
| best thing Microsoft did.
| hulitu wrote:
| There is a certain elegance in the OSs of the 1990-2000. NT was
| a bit slow but predictible. It got slower as you loaded it.
| Now, with preemptive multitasking some things are very fast and
| some are very slow. Why do i have to wait seconds for the
| cursor to blink ? Why it doesn't blink at a constant rate?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| It's the best thing Microsoft ever did... compared to the other
| things Microsoft did at the time.
|
| Microsoft has always had a shit ton of extremely smart people,
| mired in two shit tons of middling execs.
|
| Windows NT was what happened when the product / political side
| of the company ignored the technologists for a bit.
| Goleniewski wrote:
| It was light and day. It is what it is because of the man in
| charge. Billy G knew that even he didn't have the skills to
| manage the development of NT. Therefore he got a guy called
| Dave Cutler to head it up.
|
| Dave was the man because he used to work for DEC on a project
| called Onyx and prism (A hardware/software combo to do
| essentially what NT does) was cancelled by DEC at the last
| minute.
|
| MS wanted him that much that they brought his entire
| Development team to MS (not one person was left behind, at his
| demand. They where quite ...tribal...)
|
| This is also part of the reason NT originally worked on DEC
| systems as well.
|
| It's all in a rather fascinating book called Showstopper: The
| Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at
| Microsoft
|
| For a few bucks it really is a most excellent read that goes
| into some techy and really fascinating issues they encountered.
| One of the biggest was Memory was so little back then.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I quite like the NT kernel from a design standpoint. Sadly
| some of the cooler features were removed over time, like
| offering Win32, Posix and OS/2 APIs as equal subsystems for
| interacting with the kernel (though the capability became
| useful again with WSL1). The entire user management and
| rights management story is very well thought out; somewhat
| complicated but incredibly powerful. And while it's not the
| fastest kernel out there, it really excels at keeping the
| system interactive and useful under CPU and memory pressure.
|
| If only the userspace was as good as the kernel. A lot of
| good things were (and still are) obscure because they aren't
| properly surfaced in the Windows UI.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| NT 3.x did not have the video driver in kernel, so it was
| extremely stable. I liked it a lot at school, felt silky smooth
| on the 486DX66 in the lab.
| s1mon wrote:
| I used it to run Pro/Engineer (now called Creo) in the mid-90s.
| Prior to that, it only ran on Unix workstations from Sun, SGI,
| etc.
|
| I also had Macs for personal stuff at the time. I remember NT
| being remarkably stable in comparison to regular Windows, and
| MacOS of the time. It would run for weeks and weeks without
| crashing or rebooting. It wasn't sexy, but it worked.
| GrumpyYoungMan wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by "good OS". Architecturally, it was
| a descendant of VMS and its kernel was considered well
| engineered for its time. It had a ton of bugs and security
| issues but so did all the pre-2.0 Linux kernels/distributions
| that were its contemporary.
|
| From the userland and UI perspective, well, it's just Windows,
| both in the positive and negative sense; NT is the granddady of
| Windows XP and Windows 7 both of which were well regarded but
| NT also suffered from all the warts and ugliness caused by
| being converted into a consumer OS.
| jedberg wrote:
| I liked windows NT so much I traveled an hour on public transit
| to stand in a two hour line to get a beta copy of Windows NT 4,
| and ran it as my daily driver (upgrading to non-beta) until I
| just switched to Linux (and then the first version of MacOS X).
|
| This was after I tried to take the NT 3.51 kernel and marry it
| with the Win95 UI (that didn't work).
| anyfoo wrote:
| > This was after I tried to take the NT 3.51 kernel and marry
| it with the Win95 UI (that didn't work).
|
| How in C:\>'s name would that have been possible? Windows 95
| was an unholy mixture of 16bit code running in vm86 mode
| interleaved with 32bit code, and nearly full Windows 3.1
| compatibility even in lower level aspects. NT was a
| _relatively_ clean full 32bit reimplementation.
|
| Was the UI part so cleanly separated to have a chance at
| that? (Not what my impression was, but I really never dived
| that deep into Windows.)
| jedberg wrote:
| It couldn't. :) I was dumb and naive and just tried to
| replace the kernel on win95 with the WinNT kernel. Like
| just the one sys file.
|
| After booting it just sat there like "what in C:\>'s name
| have you done to me?!"
| anyfoo wrote:
| > I was dumb and naive and just tried to replace the
| kernel on win95 with the WinNT kernel.
|
| Hahah, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't do equally
| naive stuff back in the day, I know exactly what your
| kind of thinking was.
|
| It's almost sad, because understanding takes the magic
| away. I sort of miss looking at computers with the eyes
| of a child and wondering what lies behind the
| abstractions...
| progman32 wrote:
| One time, I really wanted to get an EXE of my QuickBasic
| programs. I just renamed the file to be myprog.exe.
| Needless to say, that didn't work. But little me learned
| that day, so I'm not gonna be embarrassed by it.
| jedberg wrote:
| I have an even better dumb story. Right after high school
| I visited my friend at Berkeley, and while there I wrote
| down his IP address.
|
| When I got home I changed my IP to be a different one on
| the same subnet and matched the gateway address. I knew
| what a subnet was, I knew what a router was, but I didn't
| realize you can't just reach any router you want.
|
| I figured if I did that I could get all the stuff that
| was restricted to the Berkeley network.
|
| Needless to say it didn't work.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| I got a fancy HPUX refrigerator-sized server to replace a
| mainframe in the early 90's. Was on Netware 3.11 at the
| time and did not understand the concept of IP, so just
| made up a bunch of random IP addresses. The confusing
| thing was telnet did not work at all, but ftp kinda/sorta
| did. That was an embarrassing call with HP support, but
| the guy I talked to kindly gave me a 30-minute tutorial
| and usenet filled in the rest later (and crynwr packet
| drivers).
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| NT5/Windows 2000 was a huge leap forward for Microsoft in terms
| of design model and security. NT5.1/Windows XP had some
| iterative improvements and some things going backwards.
|
| NT4 was better than 95 in every way, but was merely mediocre.
| Microsoft's suite of workplace tools that ran on NT4 were janky
| and broken, requiring their own college degree to set up and
| administer, but they also represented a real productivity boost
| for many teams.
| philistine wrote:
| Isn't it crazy to read an article from before the frenzy of
| Windows 95! This funny thing presumes people are going to stick
| to 3.1.
| bombcar wrote:
| People _did_ stick to 3.1, at least on 386 and 486 machines. I
| knew _nobody_ who ran Windows 95 on anything less than a
| Pentium, even though it was compatible down to the 386 in most
| cases.
|
| It's just that so many people bought their _first_ computer
| around that time, that it really was able to grow quickly.
| 404mm wrote:
| I can enrich the VMS beer: Despite having Open in the name, the
| newer cans are tightly sealed and come in 32 or 64 cans. However
| these cans fit only very specific and expensive 32 or 64 oz can
| holders. Some say the first sip tastes a lot like the well known
| DOS flavor but it rapidly changes to its unique profile.
| nvr219 wrote:
| I guess this is a good place to ask. Back in the 90s there was a
| humor mailing list that was like, "Top Five such-and-such" and it
| was operated by someone named Chris. Don't remember last name.
| Does anyone remember this?
| notjustanymike wrote:
| iOS beer: Everyone drinks this! Your grandma, kids at school, the
| guy driving you to the airport. Most people don't even know
| they're drinking beer until they're too impaired to perform basic
| tasks. The makers of iOS beer believe the solution is simple:
| drink more iOS beer!
| NwtnsMthd wrote:
| Incompatible with beer mugs, you're required to drink from the
| can.
| dijit wrote:
| Sounds like Bud Light.
|
| Everyone drinks it. It's non-offensive and ubiquitous, but
| doesn't offer very much flavour.
|
| (Heavy iOS user here)
| codevark wrote:
| nimbius wrote:
| so...whos got the recipe for Linux beer?
| GrumpyYoungMan wrote:
| Linux beer: Displaced the various flavors of UNIX beer by being
| free (as in beer) and is extremely popular where that's
| important, i.e. everywhere. Tasted a bit manky in its earliest
| brewings but eventually got tasty enough to displace all the
| other UNIX beers, although Solaris beer brewers fiercely insist
| to this day that it's not nearly as good. Currently the most
| widely drunk beer in the world, although its detractors point
| out that for most of that it's only an ingredient and not being
| drank straight up. Its drinkers have a one-sided rivalry with
| Windows beer drinkers for some reason even though the latter
| has long since ceased to care.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Nowadays, the pop-tops don't break off as often - though when
| they do, you still either need a complete set of
| instructions, or a friend who has been drinking Linux Beer
| for several years. Also, available in cans of every
| imaginable size in every imaginable bar.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Conversely, I'm not sure which OS is most like my preferred UK
| real ale: "Old Grumblebelly"
| yalogin wrote:
| I thought Novell Netware was huge in 1995. Why isn't that listed
| here? Is it because it was an enterprise only beer?
| anyfoo wrote:
| Now that you mention it, indeed a pretty big omission! (For
| those who never dealt with it, it was a full blown operating
| system on the server side, with own multitasking kernel that
| had its own proprietary filesystem and everything.)
| vardump wrote:
| AmigaDOS (and Kickstart & Workbench) have always been 32 oz
| variety. Even Motorola 68000 got 32-bit address space and 32-bit
| register width. Same binary code runs fine on MC68020 and beyond.
|
| Internally MC68k was 16-bit, but from a programmer's point of
| view you got 8x 32-bit data registers, 8x 32-bit address
| registers (minus stack pointer) and a flat, 32-bit memory space.
|
| No 32-bit x 32-bit = 64-bit multiply though, only 16b x 16b =
| 32b. Same with divide.
| Findecanor wrote:
| Oh, there were some badly written programs for 68000 Amigas
| that didn't run on the 68020 or later.
|
| One "clever" trick was to store data in the highest byte of
| 32-bit pointers -- which had worked on the 68000 because it had
| only a 24-bit address bus.
|
| Another thing that didn't work was self-modifying code. The
| 68020 introduced an instruction cache, which would have had to
| be cleared first.
| vardump wrote:
| Yeah, that upper 8-bit address tagging thing was a
| "clever"... waste of cycles.
|
| Just rotating/shifting 32-bit registers by 8 places costs 24
| cycles (8 + 2 * n) on 68000, like if the value was passed in
| a register. Shifting the value by 24 places is even worse,
| massive 56 cycles...
|
| You could also do "move.b (a0), d0" directly from the pointer
| to pointer address. That'd cost just 8 cycles.
|
| Self-modifying code wasn't all that beneficial nor popular on
| 68k because of ample number of usable registers, 16,
| including a7, that is used as a stack pointer, but nothing
| prevented you from using it for something else for a while. I
| think copy protections and such used weird tricks like SMC.
|
| Machine code generators (kind of limited JITs) were useful,
| but those usually generated large enough blocks of code to
| flush a small cache by default.
|
| There were also some race conditions with DMA (like blitter
| and perhaps with disk), when DMA completion wasn't properly
| checked.
|
| But 99%+ of code didn't use those tricks and was perfectly
| compatible.
| TomMasz wrote:
| This was funny 25 years ago.
| googlryas wrote:
| This comment was worthless at all times.
| 0xbadc0de5 wrote:
| And no mention of Netware? What kind of 90's sysadmin lists NT,
| OS/2 and VMS but forgets Netware?
| TheMerovingian wrote:
| Probably the last remaining sane ones?
| anyfoo wrote:
| I thought Netware was pretty good for what it was... not
| nearly as powerful as a UNIX, but that's not what Netware
| shops usually needed. I administered it next to UNIXes (and
| some NT sites, ugh) in my youth when I jobbed as a system
| administrator before studying, and have mostly good
| memories of it. It didn't cause troubles and served a small
| to mid-size company well. Fond memories...
| mbg721 wrote:
| The thing that preserves it is that the beer style that tastes
| like licking a Christmas tree but has a high ABV won out.
| People still use Windows for the same reason.
| reaperducer wrote:
| It's still funny. All you need is a memory, and a sense of
| humor.
|
| Feels like something that someone pulled from Usenet and turned
| into a web page, back when the internet was still interesting.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| And be born more than 25 years ago and had access to these
| computers.
|
| Even though I'm old enough to have used DOS as a kid, my
| grade school didn't have any computers for student use. I
| jumped immediately to Windows 95 from DOS, but never used it
| for more than playing games and Microsoft Office.
|
| I encountered macOS 8 in High School but only used them for
| Logo (turtles!).
|
| So I really don't get the article.
| andai wrote:
| You can try all these systems today, if you're interested.
| matthewmcg wrote:
| What's most amazing to me (as somebody who's tried more beer
| styles than operating systems) is that the comparison doesn't
| really make use of actual beer styles. There's just the
| suggestion that Amiga is now an "import" beer.
|
| It's a good reminder that >25 years ago most bars and grocery
| stores has just a few different brands of larger, and maybe a
| light option or two.
| hvs wrote:
| In the mid-90's Heineken and Becks were considered "fancy"
| beers. By the late 90's , microbreweries were starting to
| appear (at least in the Chicago-area where I was living).
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Keep in mind, it's a joke meant for & by computer nerds (i.e.
| people who have tried more OSes than beer styles), not beer
| nerds.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| I don't think that it was ever funny.
|
| Something about brevity being the soul of wit.
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