Liam on Linux

Once again, recently, I have been told that I simply cannot write about -- for instance -- the comparative virtues of programming languages unless I am a programmer and I can actually program in them. That that is the only way to judge.

This could be the case, yes. I certainly get told it all the time.

But the thing is that I get told it by very smart, very experienced people who also go on to tell me that I am completely wrong about other stuff where I know that I am right, and can produce abundant citations to demonstrate it. All sorts of stuff.

I can also find other people -- just a few -- who know exactly what I am talking about, and agree, and have written much the same, at length. And their experience is the same as mine: years, decades, of very smart highly-experienced people who just do not understand and cannot step outside their preconceptions far enough to get the point.

It is not just me.

( Read more... )

I've written a few times about a coming transition in computing -- the disappearance of filesystems, and what effects this will have. I have not had any constructive dialogue with anyone.

So I am trying yet again, by attempting to to rephrase this in a historical context:

There have been a number of fundamental transitions in computing over the years.

1st generation

The very early machines didn't have fixed nonvolatile storage: they had short-term temporary storage, such as mercury delay lines or storage CRTs, and read data from offline, non-direct-access, often non-rewritable means, such as punched cards or paper tape.

2nd generation

Hard disks came along, in about 1953, commercially available in 1957: the IBM RAMAC...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_305_RAMAC

Now, there were 2 distinct types of directly-accessible storage: electronic (including core store for the sake of argument) and magnetic.

A relatively small amount of volatile storage, in which the processor can directly work on data, and a large amount of read-write volatile storage but which must be transferred into volatile storage for processing. You can't add 2 values in 2 disk blocks without transferring them into memory first.

This is one of the fundamental basic models of computer architecture. However, it has been _the_ single standard architecture for many decades. We've forgotten there was ever anything else.

[[

Aside:

There was a reversion to machines with no directly-accessible storage in the late 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s, in the form of 8-bit micros with only cassette storage.

The storage was not under computer control, and was unidirectional: you could load a block, or change the tape and save a block, but in normal use for most people except the rather wealthy, the computer operated solely on the contents of its RAM and ROM.

Note: no filesystems.

(

Trying to forestall an obvious objection:
Later machines, such as the ZX Spectrum 128 and Amstrad PCW, had RAMdisks, and therefore very primitive filesystems, but that was mainly a temporary stage due to processors that couldn't access >64kB of RAM and the inability to modify their ROMs to support widespread bank-switching, because it would have broken backwards-compatibility.)

)

]]

Once all machines have this 2-level-store model, note that the 2 stores are managed differently.

Volatile store is not structured as a filesystem as it is dynamically constructed on the fly every boot. It has little to no metadata.

Permanent store needs to have metadata as well as data. The computer is regularly rebooted, and then, it needs to be able to find its way through the non-volatile storage. Thus, increasingly elaborate systems of indexing.

But the important thing is that filesystems were a solution to a technology issue: managing all that non-volatile storage.

Over the decades it has been overloaded with other functionality: data-sharing between apps, security between users, things like that. It's important to remember that these are secondary functions.

It is near-universal, but that is an artefact of technological limitations. That the fast, processor-local storage was volatile, and non-volatile storage was slow and large enough that it had to be non-local. Nonvolatile storage is managed via APIs and discrete hardware controllers, whose main job was transferring blocks of data from volatile to non-volatile storage and back again.

And that distinction is going away.

The technology is rapidly evolving to the point where we have fast, processor-local storage, in memory slots, appearing directly in the CPUs' memory map, which is non-volatile.

Example -- Flash memory DIMMs:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/10/micron_brings_out_a_flash_dimm/

Now, the non-volatile electronic storage is increasing rapidly in speed and decreasing in price.

Example -- Intel XPoint:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/specs-for-first-intel-3d-xpoint-ssd-so-so-transfer-speed-awesome-random-io/

Note the specs:

Reads as fast as Flash.
Writes nearly the same speed as reads.
Half the latency of Flash.
100x the write lifetime of Flash.

And this is the very first shipping product.

Intel is promising "1,000 times faster than NAND flash, 10 times denser than (volatile) DRAM, and with 1,000 times the endurance of NAND".

This is a game-changer.

What we are looking at is a new type of computer.

3rd generation

No distinction between volatile and non-volatile storage. All storage appears directly in the CPUs' memory map. There are no discrete "drives" of any kind as standard. Why would you? You can have 500GB or 1TB of RAM, but if you turn the machine off, then a day later turn it back on, it carries on exactly where it was.

(Yes there will be some caching and there will need to be a bit of cleverness involving flushing them, or ACID writes, or something.)

It ships to the user with an OS in that memory.

You turn it on. It doesn't boot.

What is booting? Transferring OS code from non-volatile storage into volatile storage so it can be run. There's no need. It's in the processor's memory the moment it's turned on.

It doesn't boot. It never boots. It never shuts down, either. You may have tell it you're turning it off, but it flushes its caches and it's done. Power off.

No hibernation: it doesn't need to. The OS and all state data will be there when you come back. No sleep states: just power off.

What is installing an OS or an app? That means transferring from slow non-volatile storage to fast non-volatile storage. There is no slow or fast non-volatile storage. There's just storage. All of it that the programmer can see is non-volatile.

This is profoundly different to everything since 1957 or so.

It's also profoundly different from those 1980s 8-bits with their BASIC or Forth or monitor in ROM, because it's all writable.

That is the big change.

In current machines, nobody structures RAM as a filesystem. (I welcome corrections on this point!) Filesystems are for drives. Doesn't matter what kind of drive: hard disk, SSD, SD card, CD, DVD, DVD-RW, whatever. Different filesystems, but all need transfers from them to and from volatile storage to function.

That's going away. The writing is on the wall. The early tech is shipping right now.

What I am asking is, how will it change OS design?

All I am getting back is, "don't be stupid, it won't, OS design is great already, why would we change?"

This is the same attitude the DOS and CP/M app vendors had to Windows.

WordStar and dBase survived the transition from CP/M to MS-DOS.

They didn't survive the far bigger one from MS-DOS to Windows.

WordPerfect Corp and Lotus Corp tried. They still failed and died.

A bigger transition is about to happen. Let's talk about it instead of denying it's coming.

I was a keen owner and fan of multiple Psion PDAs (pocket digital assistants – today, I have a Psion 3C, a 5MX and a Series 7/netBook) and several Acorn desktop computers running RISC OS (I have an A310 and an A5000).

I was bitterly disappointed when the companies exited those markets. They still survive -- Psion's OS became Symbian and I had several Symbian devices, including a Sony-Ericsson P800, plus two Nokias -- a 7700 and an E90 Communicator. The OS is now dead, but Psion's handhelds still survive -- I'll get to them.

I have dozens of ARM-powered devices, and I have RISC OS Open running on a Raspberry Pi 3.

But despite my regret, both Psion's and Acorn's moves were excellent, sensible, pragmatic business decisions.

How many people used PDAs?

How many people now use smartphones?

( Read more... )

So in a thread on CIX, someone was saying that the Sinclair computers were irritating and annoying, cut down too far, cheap and slow and unreliable.

That sort of comment still kinda burns after all these decades.

I was a Sinclair owner. I loved my Spectrums, spent a lot of time and money on them, and still have 2 working ones today.

Yes, they had their faults, but for all those who sneered and snarked at their cheapness and perceived nastiness, *that was their selling point*.

They were working, usable, useful home computers that were affordable.

They were transformative machines, transforming people, lives, economies.

I had a Spectrum not because I massively wanted a Spectrum -- I would have rather had a BBC Micro, for instance -- but because I could afford a Spectrum. Well, my parents could, just barely. A used one.

My 2nd, 3rd and 4th ones were used, as well, because I could just about afford them.

If all that had been available were proper, serious, real computers -- Apples, Acorns, even early Commodores -- I might never have got one. My entire career would never have happened.

A BBC Micro was pushing £350. My used 48K Spectrum was £80.

One of those is doable for what parents probably worried was a kid's toy that might never be used for anything productive. The other was the cost of a car.
( Read more... )

My previous post was an improvised and unplanned comment. I could have structured it better, and it caused some confusion on https://lobste.rs/

Dave Cutler did not write OS/2. AFAIK he never worked on OS/2 at all in the days of the MS-IBM pact -- he was still at DEC then.

Many sources focus on only one side of the story -- the DEC side, This is important but only half the tale.

IBM and MS got very rich working together on x86 PCs and MS-DOS. They carefully planned its successor: OS/2. IBM placed restrictions on this which crippled it, but it wasn't apparent at the time just how bad this would turn out to be.

In the early-to-mid 1980s, it seemed apparent to everyone that the most important next step in microcomputers would be multitasking.

Even small players like Sinclair thought so -- the QL was designed as the first cheap 68000-based home computer. No GUI, but multitasking.

I discussed this a bit in a blog post a while ago: http://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/46833.html

Apple's Lisa was a sideline: too expensive. Nobody picked up on its true significance.

Then, 2 weeks after the QL, came the Mac. Everything clever but expensive in the Lisa stripped out: no multitasking, little RAM, no hard disk, no slots or expansion. All that was left was the GUI. But that was the most important bit, as Steve Jobs saw and nobody much else did.

So, a year later, the ST had a DOS-like OS but a bolted-on GUI. No shell, just a GUI. Fast-for-the-time CPU, no fancy chips, and it did great. It had the original, uncrippled version of DR GEM. Apple's lawsuit meant that PC GEM was crippled: no overlapping windows, no desktop drive icons or trashcan, etc.

( Read more... )

When was the last time you saw a critic write a play, compose a symphony, carve a statue?

I've seen a couple of attempts. I thought they were dire, myself. I won't name names (or media), as these are friends of friends.

Some concrete examples. I have given dozens on liam-on-linux.livejournal.com, but I wonder if I can summarise.

[1]

Abstractions. Some of our current core conceptual models are poor. Bits, bytes, directly accessing and managing memory.

If the programmer needs to know whether they are on a 32-bit or 64-bit processor, or whether it's big-endian or little-endian, the design is broken.

Higher-level abstractions have been implemented and sold. This is not a pipedream.

One that seems to work is atoms and lists. That model has withstood nearly 50Y of competition and it still thrives in its niche. It's underneath Lisp and Scheme, but also several languages far less arcane, and more recently, Urbit with Nock and Hoon. There is room for research here: work out a minimal abstraction set based on list manipulation and tagged memory, and find an efficient way to implement it, perhaps at microcode or firmware level.

( Read more... )

Although the launch of GNOME 3 was a bumpy ride and it got a lot of criticism, it's coming back. It's the default desktop of multiple distros again now. Allegedly even Linus Torvalds himself uses it. People tell me that it gets out of the way.

I find this curious, because I find it a little clunky and obstructive. It looks great, but for me, it doesn’t work all that well. It’s OK — far better than it was 2-3 years ago. But while some say it gets out of the way and lets them work undistracted, it gets in my way, because I have to adapt to its weird little quirks. It will not adapt to mine. It is dogmatic: it says, you must work this way, because we are the experts and we have decided that this is the best way.

So, on OS X or Ubuntu, I have my dock/launcher thing on the left, because that keeps it out of the way of the scrollbars. On Windows or XFCE, I put the task bar there. For all 4 of these environments, on a big screen, it’s not too much space and gives useful info about minimised windows, handy access to disk drives, stuff like that. On a small screen, it autohides.

But not on GNOME, no. No, the gods of GNOME have decreed that I don’t need it, so it’s always hidden. I can’t reveal it by just putting my mouse over there. No, I have to click a strange word in the menu bar. “Activities”. What activities? These aren’t my activities. They’re my apps, folders, files, windows. Don’t tell me what to call them. Don’t direct me to click in a certain place to get them; I want them just there if there’s room, and if there isn’t, on a quick flick of the wrist to a whole screen edge, not a particular place followed by a click. It wastes a bit of precious menu-bar real-estate with a word that’s conceptually irrelevant to me. It’s something I have to remember to do.

That’s not saving me time or effort, it’s making me learn a new trick and do extra work.

The menu bar. Time-honoured UI structure. Shared by all post-Mac GUIs. Sometimes it contains a menu, efficiently spread out over a nice big easily-mousable spatial range. Sometimes that’s in the window; whatever. The whole width of the screen in Mac and Unity. A range of commands spread out.

On Windows, the centre of the title bar is important info — what program this window belongs to.

On the Mac, that’s the first word of the title bar. I read from left to right, because I use a Latinate alphabet. So that’s a good place too.

On GNOME 3, there’s some random word I don’t associate with anything in particular as the first word, then a deformed fragment of an icon that’s hard to recognise, then a word, then a big waste of space, then the blasted clock! Why the clock? Are they that obsessive, such clock-watchers? Mac and Windows and Unity all banish the clock to a corner. Not GNOME, no. No, it’s front and centre, one of the most important things in one of the most important places.

Why?

I don’t know, but I’m not allowed to move it.

Apple put its all-important logo there in early versions of Mac OS X. They quickly were told not to be so egomaniac. GNOME 3, though, enforces it.

On Mac, Unity, and Windows, in one corner, there’s a little bunch of notification icons. Different corners unless I put the task bar at the top, but whatever, I can adapt.

On GNOME 3, no, those are rationed. There are things hidden under sub options. In the pursuit of cleanliness and tidiness, things like my network status are hidden away.

That’s my choice, surely? I want them in view. I add extra ones. I like to see some status info. I find it handy.

GNOME says no, you don’t need this, so we’ve hidden it. You don’t need to see a whole menu. What are you gonna do, read it?

It reminds me of the classic Bill Hicks joke:

"You know I've noticed a certain anti-intellectualism going around this country ever since around 1980, coincidentally enough. I was in Nashville, Tennessee last weekend and after the show I went to a waffle house and I'm sitting there and I'm eating and reading a book. I don't know anybody, I'm alone, I'm eating and I'm reading a book. This waitress comes over to me (mocks chewing gum) 'what you readin' for?'...wow, I've never been asked that; not 'What am I reading', 'What am I reading for?’ Well, goddamnit, you stumped me... I guess I read for a lot of reasons — the main one is so I don't end up being a f**kin' waffle waitress. Yeah, that would be pretty high on the list. Then this trucker in the booth next to me gets up, stands over me and says [mocks Southern drawl] 'Well, looks like we got ourselves a readah'... aahh, what the fuck's goin' on? It's like I walked into a Klan rally in a Boy George costume or something. Am I stepping out of some intellectual closet here? I read, there I said it. I feel better."

Yeah, I read. I like reading. It’s useful. A bar of words is something I can scan in a fraction of a second. Then I can click on one and get… more words! Like some member of the damned intellectual elite. Sue me. I read.

But Microsoft says no, thou shalt have ribbons instead. Thou shalt click through tabs of little pictures and try and guess what they mean, and we don’t care if you’ve spent 20 years learning where all the options were — because we’ve taken them away! Haw!

And GNOME Shell says, nope, you don’t need that, so I’m gonna collapse it all down to one menu with a few buried options. That leaves us more room for the all-holy clock. Then you can easily see how much time you’ve wasted looking for menu options we’ve removed.

You don’t need all those confusing toolbar buttons neither, nossir, we gonna take most of them away too. We’ll leave you the most important ones. It’s cleaner. It’s smarter. It’s more elegant.

Well, yes it is, it’s true, but you know what, I want my software to rank usefulness and usability above cleanliness and elegance. I ride a bike with gears, because gears help. Yes, I could have a fixie with none, it’s simpler, lighter, cleaner. I could even get rid of brakes in that case. Fewer of those annoying levers on the handlebars.

But those brake and gear levers are useful. They help me. So I want them, because they make it easier to go up hills and easier to go fast on the flat, and if it looks less elegant, well I don’t really give a damn, because utility is more important. Function over form. Ideally, a balance of both, but if offered the choice, favour utility over aesthetics.

Now, to be fair, yes, I know, I can install all kinds of GNOME Shell extensions — from Firefox, which freaks me out a bit. I don’t want my browser to be able to control my desktop, because that’s a possible vector for malware. A webpage that can add and remove elements to my desktop horrifies me at a deep level.

But at least I can do it, and that makes GNOME Shell a lot more usable for me. I can customise it a bit. I can add elements and I could make my favourites bar be permanent, but honestly, for me, this is core functionality and I don’t think it should be an add-on. The favourites bar still won’t easily let me see how many instances of an app are running like the Unity one. It doesn’t also hold minimised windows and easy shortcuts like the Mac one. It’s less flexible than either.

There are things I like. I love the virtual-desktop switcher. It’s the best on any OS. I wish GNOME Shell were more modular, because I want that virtual-desktop switcher on Unity and XFCE, please. It’s superb, a triumph.

But it’s not modular, so I can’t. And it’s only customisable to a narrow, limited degree. And that means not to the extent that I want.

I accept that some of this is because I’m old and somewhat stuck in my ways and I don’t want to change things that work for me. That’s why I use Linux, because it’s customisable, because I can bend it to my will.

I also use Mac OS X — I haven’t upgraded to Sierra yet, so I won’t call it macOS — and anyway, I still own computers that run MacOS, as in MacOS 6, 7, 8, 9 — so I continue to call it Mac OS X. What this tells you is that I’ve been using Macs for a long time — since the late 1980s — and whereas they’re not so customisable, I am deeply familiar and comfortable with how they work.

And Macs inspired the Windows desktop and Windows inspired the Linux desktops, so there is continuity. Unity works in ways I’ve been using for nearly 30 years.

GNOME 3 doesn’t. GNOME 3 changes things. Some in good ways, some in bad. But they’re not my ways, and they do not seem to offer me any improvement over the ways I’m used to. OS X and Unity and Windows Vista/7/8/10 all give me app searching as a primary launch mechanism; it’s not a selling point of GNOME 3. The favourites bar thing isn’t an improvement on the OS X Dock or Unity Launcher or Windows Taskbar — it only delivers a small fraction of the functionality of those. The menu bar is if anything less customisable than the Mac or Unity ones, and even then, I have to use extensions to do it. If I move to someone else’s computer, all that stuff will be gone.

So whereas I do appreciate what it does and how and why it does so, I don’t feel like it’s for me. It wants me to change to work its way. The other OSes I use — OS X daily, Ubuntu Unity daily, Windows occasionally when someone pays me — don’t.

So I don’t use it.

Does that make sense?

Modern OSes are very large and complicated beasts.

This is partly because they do so many different things: the same Linux kernel is behind the OS for my phone, my laptop, my server, and probably my router and the server I'm posting this on.

Much the same is true of Windows and of most Apple products.

So they have to be that complex, because they have to do so many things.

This is the accepted view, but I maintain that this is at least partly cultural and partly historical.

Some of this stuff, like the story that “Windows is only so malware-vulnerable because Windows is so popular; if anything else were as popular, it’d be as vulnerable” is a pointless argument, IMHO, because lacking access to alternate universes, we simple cannot know.

So, look, let us consider, as a poor parallel, the industry’s own history.

Look at Windows in the mid to late 1990s as an instance.

Because MS was busily developing a whole new OS, NT, and it couldn’t do everything yet, it was forced to keep maintaining and extending an old one: DOS+Win9x.

So MS added stuff to Win98 that was different to the stuff it was adding to NT.

Some things made it across, out of sync…

NT 3.1 did FAT16, NTFS and HPFS.

Win95 only did FAT. So MS implemented VFAT: long filenames on FAT.

NT 3.1 couldn’t see them; NT 3.5 added that.
Then Win 95B added FAT32. NT 3.5 couldn’t read FAT32; it was added in 3.51 (IIRC).

Filesystems are quite fundamental — MS did the work to keep the 2 lines able to interwork

But it didn’t do it with hardware support. Not back then.

Win95: APM, Plug’n’Play, DirectX.
Later, DirectX 2 with Direct3D.
Win95B: USB1.
Win98: USB2, ACPI; GDI+.
Win98SE: basic Firewire camera-only support; Wake-on-LAN; WDM modems/audio.
WinME: USB mass storage & HID; more complete Firewire; S/PDIF.

(OK, NT 4 did include DirectX 2.0 and thus Direct3D. There were rumours that it only did software rendering on NT and true hardware-accelerated 3D wasn’t available until Windows 2000. NT had OpenGL. Nothing much used it.)

A lot of this stuff only came to the NT family with XP in 2002. NT took a long time to catch up.

My point here is that, in the late ‘90s, Windows PCs became very popular for gaming, for home Internet access over dialup, for newly-capable Windows laptops which were becoming attractive for consumers to own. Windows became a mass-market product for entertainment purposes.

And all that stuff was mainly supported on Win9x, _not_ on NT, because NT was at that time being sold to business as a business OS for business desktop computers and servers. It was notably bad as a laptop OS. It didn’t have PnP, its PCMCIA/Cardbus support and power management was very poor, it didn’t support USB at all, and so on.

Now, imagine this as an alternate universe.

In ours, as we know, MS was planning to merge its OS lines. Sensible plan, the DOS stuff was a legacy burden. But what if it wasn’t? Say it had developed Win9x as the media/consumer OS and NT as the business OS?

This is only a silly thought experiment, don’t try to blow it down by pointing out why not to do it. We know that.

They had a unified programming model — Win32. Terrified of the threat of the DoJ splitting them up, they were already working on its successor, the cross-platform .NET.

They could have continued both lines: one supporting gaming and media and laptops, with lots of special driver support for those. The other supporting servers and business desktops, not supporting all the media bells and whistles, but much more solid.

Yes it sounds daft, but this is what actually happened for the best part of 6 years, from 1996 and the releases of NT 4 and Win 95 OSR2 until Windows XP in 2002.

Both could run MS Office. Both could attach to corporate networks and so on. But only one was any good for gaming, and only the other if you wanted to run SQL Server or indeed any kind of server, firewall, whatever.

Both were dramatically smaller than the post-merger version which does both.

The tendency has been to economise, to have one do-everything product, but for years, they couldn’t do that yet, so there were 2 separate OS teams, and both made major progress, both significantly advanced the art. The PITA “legacy” platform went through lots of releases, steadily gaining functionality, as I showed with that list above, but it was all functionality that didn’t go into the enterprise OS, which went through far fewer releases — despite it being the planned future one.

Things could have gone differently. It’s hard to imagine now, but it’s entirely possible.

If IBM had committed to OS/2 being an 80386 OS, then its early versions would have been a lot better, properly able to run and even multitask DOS apps. Windows 3 would never have happened. IBM and MS would have continued their partnership for longer; NT might never have happened at all, or DEC would have kept Dave Cutler and PRISM might have happened.

If Quarterdeck had been a bit quicker with it, DESQview/X might have shipped before Windows 3, and been a far more compelling way of running DOS apps on a multitasking GUI OS. The DOS world might have been pulled in the Unix-like direction of X.11 and TCP/IP, instead of MS’s own in-house GUI and Microsoft and Novell’s network protocols.

If DR had moved faster with DR-DOS and GEM — and Apple hadn’t sued — a 3rd party multitasking DOS with a GUI could have made Windows stillborn. They had the tech — it went into Flex/OS but nobody’s heard of it.

If the later deal between a Novell-owned DR and Apple had happened, MacOS 7 would have made the leap to the PC platform:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

(Yes, it sounds daft, but this was basically equivalent to Windows 95, 3 years earlier. And for all its architectural compromises, look how successful Win95 was: 40 million copies in the first year. 10x what any previous version did.)

Maybe Star Trek would have bridged the gap and instead of NeXT Apple bought Be instead and migrated us to BeOS. I loved BeOS even more than I loved classic MacOS. I miss it badly. Others do too, which is why Haiku is still slowly moving forward, unlike almost any other non-Unix FOSS OS.

If the competing GUI computers of the late 1980s had made it into the WWW era, notably the Web 2.0 era, they might have survived. The WWW and things like Java and JavaScript make real rich cross-platform apps viable. I am not a big fan of Google Docs, but they are actually usable and I do real, serious, paying work with them sometimes.

So even if they couldn’t run PC or Mac apps, a modern Atari ST or Commodore Amiga or Acorn RISC OS system with good rich web browsers could be entirely usable and viable. They died before the tech that could have saved them, but that’s partly due to mismanagement, it’s not some historical inevitability.

If the GNU project had adopted the BSD kernel, as it considered, and not wasted effort on the HURD, Linux would never have happened and we’d have had a viable FOSS Unix several years earlier.

This isn’t entirely idle speculation, IMHO. I think it’s instructive to wonder how and where things might have gone. The way it happened is only one of many possible outcomes.

We now have effectively 3 mass-market OSes, 2 of them Unixes: Windows NT (running on phones, xBoxes and PCs), Linux (including Android), and macOS/iOS. All are thus multipurpose, doing everything from small devices to enterprise servers. (Yes, I know, Apple’s stopped pushing servers, but it did once: the Xserve made it to quad-core Xeons & its own RAID hardware.)

MS, as one company with a near-monopoly, had a strong incentive to only support one OS family, and it’s done it even when it cost it dearly — for instance, moving the phones to the NT kernel was extremely costly and has essentially cost them the phone market. Windows CE actually did fairly well in its time.

Apple, coming back from a weak position, had similar motivations.

What if instead the niches were held by different companies? If every player didn’t try to do everything and most of them killed themselves trying?

What if we’d had, say, in each of the following market sectors, 1-2+ companies with razor sharp focus aggressively pushing their own niches…

* home/media/gaming
* enterprise workstations
* dedicated laptops (as opposed to portable PCs)
* enterprise servers
* pocket PDA-type devices

And there are other possibilities. The network computer idea was actually a really good one IMHO. The dedicated thin client/smart terminal is another possible niche.

There are things that came along in the tech industry just too late to save players that were already moribund. The two big ones I’m thinking of were the Web, especially the much-scorned-by-techies (including me) Web 2, and FOSS. But there are others — commodity hardware.

I realise that now, it sounds rather ludicrous. Several companies, or at least product lines, destroyed themselves trying to copy rivals too closely — for instance, OS/2. Too much effort trying to be “a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows”, rather than trying to just be a better OS/2.

Apple didn’t try this with Mac OS X. OS X wasn’t a better Classic MacOS, it was an effectively entirely new OS that happened to be able to run Classic MacOS in a VM. (I say effectively entirely new, because OS X did very little to try to appeal to NeXT owners or users. Sure, they were rich, but there weren’t many of them, whereas there were lots of Mac owners.)

What I am getting at here, in my very very long-winded way, is this.

Because we ended up with a small number of players, each of ‘em tried to do everything, and more or less succeeded. The same OS in my phone is running the server I’ll be posting this message to, and if I happened to be using a laptop to write this, it’d be the same OS as on my PC.

If I was on my (dual-booting) Win10 laptop and was posting this to a blog on CodePlex or something, it’d be the same thing, but a different OS. If MS still offered phones with keyboards, I’d not object to a Windows phone — that’s why I switched to a Blackberry — but as it is Windows phones don’t offer anything I can’t get elsewhere.

But if the world had turned out differently, perhaps, unified by FOSS, TCP/IP, HTML, Java and Javascript, my phone would be a Symbian one — because I did prefer it, dammit — and my laptop would be a non-Unix Apple machine and my desktop an OS/2 box and they’d be talking to DEC servers. For gaming I’d fire up my Amiga-based console.

All talking over Dropbox or the like, all running Google Docs instead of LibreOffice and ancient copies of MS Word.

It doesn’t sound so bad to me. Actually, it sounds great.

Look at the failure of Microsoft’s attempt to converge its actually-pretty-good tablet interface with its actually-pretty-good desktop UI. Bombed, may yet kill them.

Look at Ubuntu’s failure to deliver its converged UI yet. As Scott Gilbertson said:

<<
Before I dive into what's new in Ubuntu 16.10, called Yakkety Yak, let's just get this sentence out of the way: Ubuntu 16.10 will not feature Unity 8 or the new Mir display server.

I believe that's the seventh time I've written that since Unity 8 was announced and here we are on the second beta for 16.10.
>>
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/26/ubuntu_16_10_beta_2_review/

And yet look at how non-techies are perfectly happy moving from Windows computers to Android and iPhones, despite totally different UIs. They have no problems at all. Different tools for different jobs.

From where we are, the idea of totally different OSes on different types of computer sounds ridiculous, but I think that’s a quirk of the market and how things happened to turn out. At different points in the history of the industry _as it actually happened_ things went very differently.

Microsoft is a juggernaut now, but for about 10 years from the mid ‘80s and early ’90s, the world completely ignored Windows and bought millions of Atari STs and Commodore Amigas instead. Rich people bought Macs.

The world still mostly ignores FreeBSD, but NeXT didn’t, and FreeBSD is one of the parents of Mac OS X and iOS, both loved by hundreds of millions of happy customers.

This is not the best of all possible worlds.

But because our PCs are so fast and so capacious, most people seem to think it is, and that is very strange to me.

As it happens, we had a mass extinction event. It wasn’t really organised enough to call it a war. It was more of an emergent phenomenon. Microsoft and Apple didn’t kill Atari and Commodore; Atari and Commodore killed each other in a weird sort of unconscious suicide pact.

But Windows and Unix won, and history is written by the winners, and so now, everyone seems to think that this was always going to be and it was obvious and inevitable and the best thing.

It wasn’t.

And it won’t continue to be.