101–110 of 469 posts
I hoped for a future free of Microsoft software, and free of UIs designed by software developers. I hoped for a future with no drive letters. The first two are successful: I use no Microsoft software in my life, and many user experiences are now designed by specialists. Although I don't have to deal with drive letters, it is odd that Microsoft still has them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man I see some really neat concepts in operating systems that were created in the 80s and 90s and somehow we got stuck with a handful of Unix-likes and Windows with small parts of operating systems of the past frankensteined in occasionally.
Rob Pike has a page on this where he laments that Unix-likes and Windows have become the only dominant OSs so OS innovation these days has mostly died. While there certainly is a resurgence of new ideas in OSs like GenodeOS, Fuschia, and others, OS development has slowed down a lot. It makes sense. Every time an OS is rewritten, applications need to make huge fundamental changes to how they work, for little gain for…
I think a lot of the things we were seeing at the OS level in the early 90s are now feasible to do in user space. That, plus the fact that it is prohibitively hard to talk to devices [1], has reduced the innovation in this area but also moved it elsewhere.
Having dealt with the pain of writing OS code, or libraries that have to function in one or more OS's, I can see why people prefer to innovate elsewhere if they possibly can.
That being said, there's a lot of possible "systems" work or work that could be described as "operating systems" in the broad sense that isn't in-kernel, and that work seems to have tailed off too.
[1] My favorite data point on this, which isn't even one of the more complex devices: back when I TA'ed CMUs "build a preemptive kernel" 15-410 class, the students wrote a kernel that would really boot. We had an old machine for their kernels if they wanted to see things working on a real machine not SIMICS. However, it had to be an old machine with a PS/2 keyboard, as the complexity of talking to a USB keyboard (or so I was told; I never verified this) was roughly equivalent to the "build a entire preemptive multitasking kernel" - and obviously far less pedagogically useful.
We wouldn’t make applications. Rather we’d deliver components which could interoperate via a binary contract. Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application. I suppose that pieces of this became true with the proliferation and adoption of open source. Rather than a binary protocol, HTTP came out on top. SharePoint brought us WebParts which tried to put the power in the hands of busin…
Bret Victor alluded to these pieces in his digs on APIs: https://vimeo.com/71278954
Hearing him name drop terms like markup language, stylesheets and internet is mind blowing. If only the promise of “no delay in response” had been achieved :-)
I expected more VR. Much more VR. From the perspective of early-90s, I was all-in on Plan 9 and expected to see a lot more influence from it. Unfortunately that didn't really happen, with a few exceptions (/proc).
With this hindsight, any predictions for the future? 30 years from now?
Definitely thought that consumer software (the thing sold in boxes on store shelves) would continue to get bigger as a category rather than die out completely. Anyone remember that famous photo of the guy jumping with joy after snagging a launch copy of Windows 95? No one knew what the internet really was and what it would become. Not Bill Gates, not anyone else. Developers believed that processing power, RAM, storag…
If you're using something like Visual Studio then that's is a very fancy IDE and a long long way from writing C in a text editor and dealing with arcane compile errors.
The latest IDE's are certainly doing more of this with code highlighting and autocompletion, but IMHO it could still be easier for coders to more visually annotate and document code.
I hoped for a future free of Microsoft software, and free of UIs designed by software developers. I hoped for a future with no drive letters. The first two are successful: I use no Microsoft software in my life, and many user experiences are now designed by specialists. Although I don't have to deal with drive letters, it is odd that Microsoft still has them.
I was hoping for more even better UI's designed by programmers