Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use
davidad.github.io
Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use
#2This is an outstanding essay -- more fields need this kind of thinking. Plus it's doubly ironic having it in computation, a field that has always seemed determined to ignore history, and reinvent it.
A nano nit: Yes, GC came from Lisp, but its first mention was in AI Memo #1 (the first MIT AI Lab working paper) by Minsky. I have a copy someplace -- it was only a few pages long.
Re: Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use
#3"ARPAnet is the quintessential computer network. It was originally called “the Intergalactic Computer Network” and ultimately became known as simply “the Internet”."
Awesome, I did not know that.
Re: Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use
#4This is an outstanding essay -- more fields need this kind of thinking. Plus it's doubly ironic having it in computation, a field that has always seemed determined to ignore history, and reinvent it. A nano nit: Yes, GC came from Lisp, but its first mention was in AI Memo #1 (the first MIT AI Lab working paper) by Minsky. I have a copy someplace -- it was only a few pages long.
I would love to read that if you could post it.
Re: Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use
#5Didn't know what to expect going into this with a title like that, but was pleasantly surprised. A legitimate list.
Re: Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use
#6Haven't people been communicating information to other people as text for thousands of years? I'm not so convinced that there's a universally better mechanism for communicating with machines.
Re: Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use
#7[Transactions] enabled the development of systems called databases, which can reliably maintain the state of complex data structures across incessant read and write operations as well as some level of hardware failures.
This is interesting. It suggests to me that either the author is using a nonstandard or outdated definition of "database" or that a denotation-fundamental tenet of database implementation, transactions, has been left for dead by the side of the road by many modern "database" projects.
Regardless, this is a great and informative piece.
Re: Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use
#8Only? No mention of viewport clipping? Compression? Encryption? Bittorrent?
Re: Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use
#9I find that in the pursuit of the latest and greatest, a pattern we so often see in society, it is easy to forget to let our historical experiences of the past inform our current and future thinking. There is a place for both - pure forward thinking creation as well as innovation inspired by the past.
Re: Systems Past: The software innovations we actually use
#10Haven't people been communicating information to other people as text for thousands of years? I'm not so convinced that there's a universally better mechanism for communicating with machines.
Yes. This is what I always think when people criticize text-based programming languages.
People also point and gesture and use body language to communicate. Both can be done at once, and you can communicate without using a single spoken or written word.