What have we lost? [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#71

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

artificialLimbs wrote: post #53

jamexcb wrote: post #24

AS 400 is still going strong for many companies!

Am in my first IBMi class literally right now. It seems completely different than the Windows/Linux systems I've used for the last 25 years. There are techs from 2 other companies in attendance. Apparently IBMi is used widely in banking. It was the only thing NOT totaled when we got hit with ransomware, and is what holds our PII for our clients/workers.

> It was the only thing NOT totaled when we got hit with ransomware, and is what holds our PII for our clients/workers.

Because it's actually more secure, or because it's so obscure that the malware didn't know what to do with it?

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#72

Post by thequux » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #71

artificialLimbs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am in my first IBMi class literally right now. It seems completely different than the Windows/Linux systems I've used for the last 25 years. There are techs from 2 other companies in attendance. Apparently IBMi is used widely in banking. It was the only thing NOT totaled when we got hit with ransomware, and is what holds our PII for our clients/workers.

> It was the only thing NOT totaled when we got hit with ransomware, and is what holds our PII for our clients/workers. Because it's actually more secure, or because it's so obscure that the malware didn't know what to do with it?

Some combination of the two. IBM i has its vulnerabilities, but because of the way that the OS is built, getting code execution accidentally is extremely difficult, and even getting native code to run given full access to the system requires mucking about with the objects on disk.

However, with IBM i comes PASE, which provides a AIX-like environment that can run most software built for AIX directly, and that's going to have the same sort of vulnerabilities as any other UNIX system. As far as I know, that's mostly used for new development, though, because developers don't like learning unfamiliar platforms.

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#73

Post by Ologn » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 5:56 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #46

sk5t wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reduc…

> I was always surprised [AFS] (or a similar mechanism) was not available in corporate offices.

In some ways it was self-fulfilling - corporate offices didn't use it, so there wasn't a great ecosystem, so corporate offices did not use it.

There were a handful of vendors, all with drawbacks. On a large network, AFS, or particular cells or filesystems could get into a weird state. It was not like Solaris NFS where most senior sysadmins understood the filesystem error states.

You want to feel you are putting data into something safe, permanent and always accessible, and AFS never felt like that in corporate environments I was in.

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#74

Post by rhn_mk1 » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

turbinerneiter wrote: post #67

CodeArtisan wrote: post #19

Smalltalk Pharo is like these OS: an environment where everything is an object that you can inspect, modify, duplicate, ... Here a demo with a minesweeper clone i once made to discover Pharo: https://files.catbox.moe/jggff7.webm It was really amazing but i didn't went further than that; Using Pharo quickly felt like being on a secluded island. More about Pharo: https://pharo.org/features

I feel like dbus and systems built around it (i.e. Gnome) are at least a glimpse at that.

How does it compare? d-bus is just an inter-process communication mechanism, houw would it bring us closer to copying a Minesweeper window?

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#75

Post by throw36820 » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

thequux wrote: post #17

ArtWomb wrote: post #2

This 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,…

We've been talking about doing a follow-on talk this year focusing on network computing environments. Plan 9 and Apollo DomainOS are likely to make appearances, but more ideas are welcome.

That's awesome! Looking forward to it.

What about the 'PLATO system'?

"Long before Facebook's and Google's founders were born, and before Microsoft and Apple were founded. Before Xerox PARC. Before the Web. AOL. Bulletin boards and CompuServe. Before the Internet. Long before MOOCs (massively open online courses). Before pretty much everything we take for granted today, there was the PLATO system: home of not only computer-based education but, surprisingly, the first online community, and the original incubator for social computing: instant messaging, chat rooms, message forums, the world's first online newspaper, interactive fiction, emoticons, animations, virtual goods and virtual economies, a thriving developer community, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), personal publishing, screen savers. PLATO is where flat-panel gas plasma displays come from, and was one of the first systems with touch panels built-in to the screen. Countless other innovations." [1]

The book 'The Friendly Orange Glow' by Brian Dear details all about it. He says it's "a book in the works for more than two decades. Based on extensive research, including interviews with hundreds of key individuals who designed, built, managed, sold, and used the PLATO system."

[1] http://friendlyorangeglow.com/

PLATO on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

Book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Friendly-Orange-Glow-Untold-Cybercult...

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#76

Post by xkriva11 » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 6:59 PM UTC

spillguard wrote: post #48

jcelerier wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 programme…

More likely, they changed the conditions.

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#77

Post by AtlasBarfed » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #25

ori_b wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We lost the environment where the whole OS was a debugger, and everything could be inspected and modified as the system was running.

This was an intentional move even if no one else wants to admit it. You can't hide implementation from the User in such an environment; at least not to the degree you can with precompiled programs with debug symbols stripped. One requires you to infer function from raw assembly, the other, lets you step through areas of code that vendors want to keep out of the reach of user understanding. 90% of established security…

Operating Systems that are actually in use show that the real difficulty of Computer Science isn't deeply complex algorithmic complexity (although OSs have algorithms and data structures in spades)

The real problem is just mundane management / organization / interface / documentation that plain old enterprisey software fails on.

A lot of what is lost was handling a much smaller breadth of hardware, applications, and as you pointed out, a much simpler security exposure profile.

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#78

Post by albertzeyer » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

cuillevel3 wrote: post #8

albertzeyer wrote: post #6

On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RNbIEJvjUA (The media.ccc.de server was a bit slow for me.)

Most mirrors are in Germany: https://cdn.media.ccc.de/events/rc3/h264-hd/rc3-r3s-20-eng-W...

Yes, but I'm actually located in Germany myself. I assumed that there was just too much traffic caused by HN.

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#79

Post by vidarh » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

js8 wrote: post #59

vidarh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you misunderstand. The 3rd stack would be parallel to data stack, and would be used during interpretation for dynamic type checking (and also completion), or during compilation to do static type checking (and also type inference).

I got that. The point I was making is that type tagging is an alternative to this that saves you from keeping the extra stack in sync, as well as avoids sacrificing another register as a stack pointer.

It's also well trodden ground in the form of tagged unions of various forms going back at least to ALGOL 68 so there's plenty of literature on the subject.

Re: What have we lost? [video]

#80

Post by turbinerneiter » Wed, Apr 07, 2021, 7:53 PM UTC

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #74

turbinerneiter wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like dbus and systems built around it (i.e. Gnome) are at least a glimpse at that.

How does it compare? d-bus is just an inter-process communication mechanism, houw would it bring us closer to copying a Minesweeper window?

A tiny, tiny glimpse.

It's a bit more than IPC, it's a discoverable object system.

Very far away from copying UI elements.