[HN Gopher] Aftermath of the Kernel Wars
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Aftermath of the Kernel Wars
Author : ingve
Score : 32 points
Date : 2023-05-01 06:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (deprogrammaticaipsum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (deprogrammaticaipsum.com)
| ch_123 wrote:
| > Operating Systems were at the heart of that war. Back in 1980,
| they were a relatively new concept. From the 1950s to the 80s, we
| had been using countless computers without anything resembling an
| operating system.
|
| The fact that many of the operating systems we still use to this
| day have origins in systems created during the 60s and 70s is one
| of the many problems I have with this statement.
| erwan577 wrote:
| the conclusion feels a little abrupt to me. What about the
| differences between web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0? What about the failed
| W3C standards? What about the limitations of web apps compared to
| native mobile apps? What about the closed gardens that
| Facebook/Meta and newer social networks are trying to build? And
| lastly, countries are restricting web access to their own
| jurisdiction. The wars are just beginning.
| erwan577 wrote:
| Also the language wars are related to the platform/OS wars but
| are much more diverse.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Whole article feels abrupt. The hasty pace feels like its
| trying to get the reader to the end as fast as possible while
| saying as little as possible. Not sure what the point even is
| other than a very brisk walk down memory lane.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| I think he also missed the fact that Windows NT came from VMS,
| not unix. The article needed an editor for sure.
|
| I think your point rings true, there are always these platform
| wars. But there is much more ease of interoperability now. Even
| reading a 5.25" disk on a different system was sometimes
| impossible, lots of things like that. Keyboards and monitors
| had different connectors.
|
| When Apple went to USB it was like a miracle. Circa.. 1995?
| Maybe with the iMac.
| p_l wrote:
| iMac was the one with usb replacing serial, parallel, ADB and
| floppy with built in cdrom and usb.
|
| This meant some issues that were quite complained about,
| because at its release in 1998 the only way to export data
| was over network (or IrDA). USB Mass Storage was supported
| starting next year, and pendrives debuted in 2000.
| winter_blue wrote:
| This article is really shallowly and poorly-written, like one of
| those cheap "pop science" magazines. I wish Computer Science
| wasn't affected by this sort of bottom-of-the-barrel journalism.
|
| The author embellishes, makes sweeping inaccurate statements
| (that users only care about price and buying the cheapest
| product? that's patently untrue in any field), and dismisses
| technical excellence (like strong _static_ typing) as
| meaningless. Terrible.
|
| In my opinion, LWN is the gold standard of good technical
| journalism ( _on fairly-advanced topics_ , like operating
| system).
|
| Hope more folk emulate LWN.
| debo_ wrote:
| LWN is great. I also enjoyed this; I didn't take it very
| seriously, and I enjoyed the presentation of this history as a
| variant of the Iliad. I laughed quite a few times.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I felt like I was experiencing the writer's ADHD trying to read
| the article. There was no real coherent narrative, just a bunch
| of quick cuts and asides.
|
| I've got my own ADHD, I don't need somebody else's as well.
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| As a mere casual observer of the time period discussed, I found
| this delightful.
| asldkfjaslkdj wrote:
| open article. Ctrl+F "tainted". zero matches.
|
| I didn't bother reading the article because of that.
|
| Big Enterprise won the kernel wars. After Balmer freaking out and
| paying a hit piece calling "Linux a cancer", everyone managed to
| work around GPL and be able to inject non-free parts in the
| kernel. Linux compromised with the "tainted kernel" and later
| just gave up. Result: Android is a linux, and is the most closed
| source system on earth. Thousands of people throw away perfectly
| good android phones just because the owner of the source code
| refuses to release a update.
|
| Linux lost. Well, at least the spirit of it.
| djha-skin wrote:
| Reminds me of a line from the Common Lisp Cookbook[1]:
|
| > Keep in mind that it was written at a time where Lisp Machines
| were at their peak. On these boxes Lisp was your operating
| system!
|
| Common Lisp OS interfacing is not part of the standard, because
| there were no "operating systems" back when Common Lisp Standard
| started out other than Lisp itself. It, too, was a casualty of
| the OS wars, but it lives on in user space, where it now lurks,
| and bides its time.
|
| 1: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/os.html
| gumby wrote:
| > there were no "operating systems" back when Common Lisp
| Standard started out other than Lisp itself.
|
| This isn't really true, of course.
|
| Sure, Commonlisp was mainly the standardization of MIT Lipsm
| lisp (based on MACLISP), influenced by good ideas from PARC's
| D-Machine Interlisp-D (based on Interlisp). Both ran on the
| bare iron of their respective machines.
|
| But their predecessors MACLISP and BBN Interlisp both ran on
| PDP-10s under Tenex, Twenex (and those latter two's official
| OSes) and MACLISP also on PDP-10 ITS (its original home)
| Multics (both hardware and an OS). Other MACLISP-ish Lisps such
| as VAXLISP (VMS) and franz lisp (Unix on PDP-11s and Vaxes)
| contributed as well. These were all user space environments.
| gumby wrote:
| By the way the PDP-6 (and thus its dependent the PDP-10) was
| explicitly designed to be a "Lisp machine" -- a machine word
| was a cons and many fundamental lisp operations like car and
| cdr were single machine instructions.
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| > Android won the second, although some regions of the world
| remain under the control of iOS
|
| this author has no clue what operative system is. There is more
| sense in the Stallmann GNU/linux copypasta.
| erwan577 wrote:
| the author considers an "operating system" as the ecosystem
| where the user live and find a convenient application "store".
| Same store = same OS. Different store = different OS.
|
| So with this reasoning maybe soon Windows = Linux but Android
| != Linux.
| arp242 wrote:
| Try doing some useful work after installing the Linux kernel -
| and just the kernel - on a device.
|
| You can't. You need more than just a kernel, quite a bit more,
| and that's an operating system. "GNU plus Linux" or whatever
| you want to call it, or Android, or whatever. In that sense
| Stallman is correct that "the Linux kernel is just one piece of
| the operating system" (although his insistence on GNU/Linux is
| still rather wrongheaded IMO, but I don't feel like repeating
| that discussion).
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| There's plenty of people who do - see the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unikernel stuff and Firecracker
| VMs and simplified runtimes like Lambda - But agreed, a
| useful consumer computer requires a whole suite of programs
| and tools that comprise a "OS" to be useful.
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(page generated 2023-05-02 23:02 UTC)