I give up on prediction. I never thought UNIX would have lasted this long. Personal computing bounces back and forth between local devices and remote services every decade or so. I will offer a few interesting observations. Back when I was still at BRL (somewhere around 1983 probably), one of my coworkers walked in and said that in a few years they'd be able to give me a computer as powerful as a VAX, and it will sit on my desk, and I’ll have exclusive use of it and be happy. I pointed out that this was unlikely (the being happy part), as my expectations would increase as time goes on. Ron’s Rule Of Computing: “I need a computer ‘this’ big” (which is accompanied by holding my arms out about the width of a VAX 780 CPU cabinet. Hanging up on the wall in one of the machine rooms I administered was a sign comparing the computer that had sat there (the ENIAC) to a then HP 65 calculator. The HP 65 would have been an incredible tool to the ENIAC guys, but now It seems way dated. A lot of computer discussion mentioned what would happen if a hacker had access to a CRAY computer. Could he perhaps brute force the crypt in the UNIX password file? Oddly, when BRL got their first Cray (an X/MP preempted from Apple’s delivery slot), I was given pretty much as much time as I wanted to try to vectorize the crypt routine. It wasn’t particularly easy, and we had other parallel processors that were easier to program that were doing a better job at the hack for less money. I actually signed for the BRL Cray 2 but it didn’t get installed until after I left. Ron’s Rule of Software Deployment: “Stop making cutovers on major holidays.” The dang government kept doing things like the long leader conversion on the Arpanet and the TCP/IP changeover on Jan 1. It drove me nuts that our entire group ended up working over the holidays to bring the new systems up. At one point when they were rejiggering the USENET groups, the proposal was to do it on Labor Day weekend. I pointed out (this was the Atlanta UUG) that it violated the above rule AND was particularly bad because many of the USENET system admins were going to be back in Atlanta for the World Science Fiction Convention that weekend. And finally, Ron’s Rule of Electrical Engineering: “If two things can be plugged into each other, some fool will do so. You better make it work, or at least benignly fail when it happens.” Somewhere I have a cord that one of my employees made me which has a 110V plug on one side and an RJ-11 on the other (fortunately it is non functional).

I don't think so. RJ-11? More like a telephone killer, or home firestarter. --corey

of zero-cost VM's?  What would a meta-OS need to manage that?  Would we still recognize it as a Unix? This may be off topic, but the aim of studying history is to avoid the mistakes of the past.  And part of that is being honest about where we are now... IMHO, hardware has left software in the dust.  I figured out that if cars had evolved since 1970 at the same rate as computer memory, we could now buy 1,000 Tesla Model S's for a penny, and each would have a top speed of 60,000 MPH.  This is roughly a factor of a trillion in less than 50 years. For quite a while, hardware (Moore's law) was giving software cover--the hardware speed and capacity was exceeding the rate of bloat in software.  For the last decade, that's stopped happening (the hardware speed, not the software bloat!)   What hardware is now giving us is many many more of the same thing rather than the same thing faster.  To fully exploit the hardware, the old model of telling a processor "do this, then do this, then do this" simply doesn't scale.  Things like multicore look to me like a desperate attempt to hold onto an outmoded model of computing in the face of a radically different hardware landscape. The company I'm working for now, Wave Computing, is building a chip with 16,000 8-bit processors on a chip.  These processors know how to snuggle up together and do 16-, 32-, and 64-bit arithmetic.  The chip is intended to be part of systems with as many as a quarter million processors, with machine learning being one possible target.  There are no global signals on the chip (e.g., no central clock).  (The hardware people aren't perfect--it's not yet sunk in that making a billion transistors operate fast while remaining in synch is ultimately an impossible goal as the line sizes get smaller). Chips like ours are not intended to be general purpose -- they act more like FPGA's. They allow tremendous resources to be focused on a single problem at a time.  And the focus to change quickly as desired.  They aren't good for everything.  But I do think they represent the current state of hardware pretty well, and the trends are strongly towards even more of the same.  The closest analogy of programming for the chip is microcode -- it's as if you have a programmable machine with hundreds or thousands of "instructions" that are far more powerful than traditional instructions, able to operate on structured data and do many arithmetic operations.  And you can make new instructions at will.  The programming challenge is to wire these instructions together to get the desired effect. This may not be the only path to the future, and it may fail to survive or be crowded out by other paths.  But the path we have been on for the last 50 years is a dead end, and the quicker we wise up and grab the future, the better... Steve PS: another way to visualize the hardware progress:  If we punched out a petabyte of data onto punched cards, the card deck height would be 6 times the distance to the moon!  Imagine the rubber band....

On 2017-01-11 12:01, corey(a)lod.com wrote: A fix for this obviously broken etherkiller would be UI. Doesn't a telephone killer need a Honda portable generator on the other end of that RJ-11 ;) ObOT: Considering it is in now the realm of possibilities to simulate a ~ 1986 internet under a desk and stuff a ~ 1994 geocities in a netbook.. I imagine running close to a billion x86 emulators under the desk while running a copy of pinterest and facebook on it. I'll probably need a larger pid_t and rewrite some shell scripts in Rust or what you have by then.

On 17 Jan 2017 13:09 +0000, from tfb(a)tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw): I'm personally inclined to agree with Tim here. That's not to say that I don't think some of those processes could be pushed a bit farther, but as much as we would love it in some cases, a function on the form f(x)=Ca^{Dx} (for any values of C, D and a) describing something that can exist in the real world simply cannot continue forever before encountering some real-world limit. Zoom out what appears to be an exponential curve and more often than not, it turns out that what looked like an exponential curve was really the first portion of a S curve or (even worse in many cases) a portion of a parabola. Either that, or it's something like the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation or the relativistic colinear velocity addition formula, where the exponent is something you try very hard to _avoid_ the effects of for one reason or another. What could conceivably change that picture somewhat is a total paradigm shift in computing, kind of like if large general-purpose quantum computers turn out to be viable after all. But even in that case I'm pretty sure that at some point we would realize that we are on the same kind of S curve or parabola there as well, only having delayed the inevitable or shifted the origin. That's not to say that even steady-state computer power can't provide huge benefits. It absolutely can. Even the computers we have and are able to actually build today are immensely powerful both in terms of computational capability and storage, and they are, to a large degree, scalable with the proper software and algorithms. The kind of computer I have _at home_ today (which wasn't even top of the line when I put it together a few years ago) would have been considered almost unimaginably powerful just a few decades ago. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)

Steve, you're probably aware of this but I'll chip in for everyone else: Ivan Sutherland has been working on "clockless" computing for the last many years - he's at Portland State University these days. I've had the privilege of listening to him talk just a little about this subject even though I'm not an EE. Erik Fair