Sandcastles and skyscrapers

The problem with the Unix lowest-common-denominator model is that it pushes complexity out of the stack and into view, because of stuff other designs _thought_ about and worked to integrate.

It is very important never to forget the technological context of UNIX: a text-only OS for a tiny, already obsolete and desperately resource-constrained, standalone minicomputer. It was written for a machine that was already obsolete, and it shows.

No graphics. No networking. No sound. Dumb text terminals, which is why the obsession with text files being piped to other text files and filtered through things that only handle text files.

While at the same time as UNIX evolved, other bigger OSes for bigger minicomputers were being designed and built to directly integrate things like networking, clustering, notations for accessing other machines over the network, accessing filesystems mounted remotely over the network, file versioning and so on.

I described how VMS pathnames worked in this comment recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32083900

People brought up on Unix look at that and see needless complexity, but it isn't.

VMS' complex pathnames are the visible sign of an OS which natively understands that it's one node on a network, that currently-mounted disks can be mounted on more than one network nodes even if those nodes are running different OS versions on different CPU architectures. It's an OS that understands that a node name is a flexible concept that can apply to one machine, or to a cluster of them, and every command from (the equivalent of) `ping` to (the equivalent of) `ssh` can be addressed to a cluster and the nearest available machine will respond and the other end need never know it's not talking to one particular box.

50 years later and Unix still can't do stuff like that. It needs tons of extra work with load-balancers and multi-homed network adaptors and SANs to simulate what VMS did out of the box in the 1970s in 1 megabyte of RAM.

The Unix was only looks simple because the implementors didn't do the hard stuff. They ripped it out in order to fit the OS into 32 kB of RAM or something.

The whole point of Unix was to be minimal, small, and simple.

Only it isn't any more, because now we need clustering and network filesystems and virtual machines and all this baroque stuff piled on top.

The result is that an OS which was hand-coded in assembler and was tiny and fast and efficient on non-networked text-only minicomputers now contains tens of millions of lines of unsafe code in unsafe languages and no human actually comprehends how the whole thing works.

Which is why we've build a multi-billion-dollar industry constantly trying to patch all the holes and stop the magic haunted sand leaking out and the whole sandcastle collapsing.

It's not a wonderful inspiring achievement. It's a vast, epic, global-scale waste of human intelligence and effort.

Because we build a planetary network out of the software equivalent of wet sand.

When I look at 2022 Linux, I see an adobe and mud-brick construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mosque_of_Djenn%C3%A9#/m...

When we used to have skyscrapers.

You know how big the first skyscraper was? 10 floors. That's all. This is it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Insurance_Building#/media...

The point is that it was 1885 and the design was able to support buildings 10× as big without fundamental change.

The Chicago Home Insurance building wasn't very impressive, but its design was. Its design scaled.

When I look at classic OSes of the past, like in this post, I see miracles of design which did big complex hard tasks, built by tiny teams of a few people, and which still works today.

When I look at massive FOSS OSes, mostly, I see ant-hills. It's impressive but it's so much work to build anything big with sand that the impressive part is that it works at all... and that to build something so big, you need millions of workers, and constant maintenance.

If we stopped using sand, and abandoned our current plans, and started over afresh, we could build software skyscrapers instead of ant hills.

But everyone is too focussed on keeping our sand software working on our sand hill OSes that they're too busy to learn something else and start over.