History of Computer Hardware

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"Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" lamented Rob Pike in 2000 (lemmy.ml)

submitted 8 months ago by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/hoch@lemmy.ml

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This talk is a polemic that distills the pessimistic side of my feelings about systems research these days. I won’t talk much about the optimistic side, since lots of others can do that for me; everyone’s excited about the computer industry. I may therefore present a picture somewhat darker than reality. However, I think the situation is genuinely bad and requires action.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike for context

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[–] cubism_pitta@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

Today we mainly have

Unix

Linux

Windows

TempleOS

At the time; 1999 some of the choices were

Unix

Mac

Linux

BeOS

DOS

Windows

WindowsNT

I think that realistically we are just at a point where computers have matured enough that the operating system archituetures are largely irrelevant and creating new things is likely not to add value. A hammer is a hammer.

I would really like to see more things happening with ARM and RISC-V. Hardware had been incredibly stagnant until Apple went ARM. They seem to be the only company seriously doing this at the consumer level right now though.