What else comes to my mind: OS/2 Warp, NeXT OS, SGI IRIX
I still miss Warp. It was actually a pretty great OS. BeOS was fantastic as well.
What have we lost? [video]
41–50 of 86 posts
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#42Re: What have we lost? [video]
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great. So, can you hook in to a running browser the next time a tab crashes, fix it, and continue viewing the website, with no prior setup? How?
Well, yes, unless you count installing IntelliJ as prior setup: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/debugging-javascript-in-... It'd be easier to do it with the Chrome debugger though. I sometimes 'fix' websites that have annoying popups or similar with the dev tools. With complex apps you have the problem that the owners don't want you modifying them, so they're minified and have other techniques applied that debugg…
I'm not understanding how you propose to resurrect and continue the process after the tab segfaults.
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#44This talk looks pretty epic. I'm glad this discussion is being injected into the mainstream. I wish every one had an opportunity to use a network computing environment such as MIT Athena once in their lives. The original plan wasn't simply to grant blanket licenses for science and simulation software to users in the academic community. But create a true edtech platform that could be used to learn anything: languages,…
Why mainstream? But yes I agree we definitely should take a hard look at any software biz older than 10 years old
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does that work when you drop to the debugger in the middle of an interrupt handler? A page fault? A task switch? How does the privilege separation work for that environment? (mostly rhetorical questions)
You'd think I was an expert, given that I gave that segment of the talk, but I haven't yet dived that deep into Genera's internals. As I understand it though, you don't have the concept of page faults at the image level; IIRC, Genera doesn't have any form of virtual memory, or if it does, it's all in microcode. Task switches are , iirc, handled in the image, but in the same way that it's done in Smalltalk: there's a…
It was intentionally designed as a single user mode-machine wasn’t it?
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#46This talk looks pretty epic. I'm glad this discussion is being injected into the mainstream. I wish every one had an opportunity to use a network computing environment such as MIT Athena once in their lives. The original plan wasn't simply to grant blanket licenses for science and simulation software to users in the academic community. But create a true edtech platform that could be used to learn anything: languages,…
AFS, Zephyr, Kerberos, BatMail in emacs--all mind-expanding stuff to me way back when!
I never really explored AFS sufficiently to understand why this was the case, but I was always surprised it (or a similar mechanism) was not available in corporate offices.
"Clear everything off of SharePoint you don't need, we're running out of room."
"The shared drive is full, we're going to purge everything not in one of the special directories. See the list."
AFS, as used at my university in the 00s, nicely reduced this problem by greatly expanding the amount of storage capacity available. It also helped speed up access to data by moving it to the system you were working on (assuming it was also an AFS node and not your personal device, in which case it was exactly like accessing a remote disk). It also helped with the "SharePoint is down again because even though we're a multibillion dollar corporation we're too cheap to hire real IT staff and Bob the Build Engineer tasked with keeping it up is on vacation." Local copies of data remained accessible.
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#47Relevant: "Why KeyKOS is fascinating" - https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41
Interesting.. it somewhat ties to what people are doing in programming languages with linear/affine types, representing resources that can be passed around but not duplicated.
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know what you are meaning but in reality we don't have.
yet there are likely an order of magnitude more smalltalk programmers today than there were at smalltalk's "peak"
I'd be curious to know how you quantified this. I was curious myself, so I dug into where Smalltalk landed in Stack Overflow's developer survey (which, of course, is not a complete overview of the entire programming industry!) - it seems that Smalltalk was the second most Loved language in 2017 [0], but it completely disappears off the chart in 2018 [1]. I would imagine that we've lost quite a few Smalltalk programmers...
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#49I was recently thinking a bit about how one could create a typed Forth-like system, by adding a 3rd parallel stack that would hold the type on the data stack, and was used for type checking. I really wanted to like Forth (which is very similar to Lisp/Smalltalk systems, even possibly more elegant in some respects), because of the system extensibility, but the stack errors drove me crazy. So if the system had the abil…
A third stack is one more thing to keep track of.
The simpler solution to this in many languages is type tagging. E.g. Ruby (MRI at least) uses a few bits to indicate type to avoid creating full-blown objects for small-ish integers, symbols, etc., and you'll find the same approach in many strongly typed dynamic languages.
Re: What have we lost? [video]
#50What else comes to my mind: OS/2 Warp, NeXT OS, SGI IRIX
I still miss Warp. It was actually a pretty great OS. BeOS was fantastic as well.
OS/2 Warp was nice to work in and fully object oriented too. It was just too resource intensive and by the time they shipped, Windows was the default.