Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

I was working at PARC when Pike was apparently there and his description of the infrastructure isn’t really correct.

There were a mix of D machines, not just Dorados (which were ECL machines that needed machine room cooling, as well as the earlier generation Dolphin machines, both using the patch panel setup he described. Also Dandelions (sold as the Xerox Star) and a few Altos. The D machines could be booted into any of the three primary environments (Interlisp, Smalltalk, or Cedar/Mesa). I never touched a disk pack (did the Dorados even have them? I think the Dolphins did. The Dandelions had 8 inch floppies — I still have a set with some custom microcode I wrote)

We had a distributed network mail system (grapevine), distributed networked filesystem you mounted directly,etc. The way he describes editing a document it sounded like he was either using an Alto or booted one of these machines in Alto mode.

No terminal rooms? Well yes, this was personal computing, not timesharing.

The speed issues he described suggest he wasn’t using a dorado. My job used Interlisp-D but I did boot into Smalltalk and Cedar sometimes to check them out. The dolphins in particular were particularly underpowered.

It’s often hard to evaluate something on its own terms rather than on the terms you are used to.

> No terminal rooms? Well yes, this was personal computing, not timesharing.

It seems that as late as 2012, he still thought personal computing was a bad idea. https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/ (see the "dream setup" section)

Well, that's not actually what he wrote. You might want to read that section again. He said his dream setup is simpler than carrying three computers, cameras, an ipod, and other oddments. What's wrong with that?

To achieve that end, he essentially says he wants all his resources somewhere else (hosted by a third party who does the hard work of keeping it online and backed up, etc) and to interact with those resources through a uniform interface via thin-clients that only use local storage and processing power as a cache.

If you still owned all the hardware in this picture, you could argue it's still "personal computing", but once you've offloaded the processing and storage to a third party, it's more "timesharing on a mainframe" than "personal computer".

There are many advantages to this approach, but it does mean giving up something.

What Rob wants is a personal computing environment that isn't restricted to a singular personal computer. I use plan 9 and the concept of your ENTIRE computing environment being portable across any number of machines, at the OS level, is priceless.

Would you be so kind to elaborate on this? "I use plan 9"

You use it for your daily work? Is this possible?

Hobby use. Though I do have a little nuc at work running 9front to write small bits of automation (IEC 61131-3, ST) and a Basic dialect of CNC RS-274 G code in acme and a little Sam here and there. I'm slowly learning it. I also write a little c code as the plan 9 c library and tooling is really nice. And I love the concurrency library, thread(2). I access the little server via drawterm from both a Linux machine and a Windows 10 machine. I can sit at either computer and have access to the same user files, configuration, etc. And drawterm gives the plan 9 session access to the host (terminal in this case) resources including the TCP stack (you can do really cool routing and tunneling tricks with this method)

I highly recommend giving it a look (I highly recommend 9front), and read nemo's intro.

Which was actually the computing environment of the early 1980s, at places like PARC, MIT (Athena), CMU (don’t remember the name of their system) as well as commercial systems like Apollo. None of which he ever mentions when touting Plan 9.

After 15 years of computing I was shocked when I realized that Sun machines kept all their data locally, ran sendmail etc. It seemed like such a huge step backwards in time.

> CMU (don’t remember the name of their system)

Andrew [1], not sure it was usable in 1984 though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Project

Our research group used Apollo's for several years and the feeling that they were all one big system (which never failed) was wonderful. Not being pure Unix was the main drawback.

A famous (very) quote about the Alto was:

  *The nice thing about the Alto is that it doesn't run any faster at night*

This was when timesharing machines were super-slow during the day, so if you wanted decent response time, you had to come in at night. The more things change...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com