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Comment by sampo | Hacker News Reader

This is what prof Andrew S. Tanenbaum was working on when he made the famous "LINUX is obsolete" post in 1992. At the end of his post:

    P.S. Just as a random aside, Amoeba has a UNIX emulator (running in user
    space), but it is far from complete. If there are any people who would
    like to work on that, please let me know. To run Amoeba you need a few 386s,
    one of which needs 16M, and all of which need the WD Ethernet card.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...

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"A bunch of high spec 386s with specific network cards" was pretty unaffordable for (especially young, and most were at the time) hobbyists in '92. We know how it went with that and Linux (which ran on most cheap 386s).

My take on "worse is better" is that "worse is cheap / free / low friction."

Better -- meaning polished, thoroughly engineered, correct, etc. -- is often heavier in terms of hardware requirements. It's also often a lot of work by serious career devs or big companies and costs money and has a non-OSS license.

All that increases not only cost but more importantly friction. So the "worse" cheap/free unencumbered thing goes viral and takes over instead.

I should add the caveat though -- it's cheap/free up front but you pay later in bugs and ugly hacks to make it work at larger scale. But up front friction matters more than friction later. If it's cheap/free in terms of cost or friction now, you'll already have sunk cost by the time the real cost becomes apparent.

I 100% agree. In fact, even in the original C/Unix versus Lisp/Lisp machines that were mentioned in Richard's Gabriel "The Rise of Worse is Better" article, C and Unix were inexpensive compared to Lisp implementations and Lisp machines. Unix's relatively liberal licensing rules in the 1970s and early 1980s helped lead to its embrace in academia, and it also gained a footing in industry, especially with the rise of Unix workstations from companies such as Sun.

Another example is how C++ and Java, but not Smalltalk, became the dominant object-oriented programming languages in the 1990s, despite Smalltalk being older and (debatably) being closer to Richard Gabriel's "right thing". There were affordable C++ implementations from Borland and Microsoft, and Sun released the Java Development Kit for free. However, the leading Smalltalk implementations of the 1990s were much more expensive. Perhaps had there been a Borland Turbo Smalltalk or a Microsoft Visual Smalltalk in the 1990s, maybe things would have turned out differently.

March 7, 1988 — "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95, the company said. Registered users of Digitalk's Smalltalk/V can upgrade for $75 until June 1."

https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=d...

September 1991 — "Smalltalk/V code is portable between the Windows and the OS/2 versions. And the resulting application carries no runtime charges. All for just $499.95."

(Advert on the last page of "The Smalltalk Report")

https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkRepor...

September 1991 — "Digitalk, Inc. announced new versions of Smalltalk/V DOS and Smalltalk/V Mac that include royalty-free runtime. Smalltalk/V Windows and Smalltalk/V PM are already royalty free. … Prior to this new policy, there was a per-copy charge for runtime applications."

"The Smalltalk Report" p25

https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkRepor...

https://wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/914

Lest we forget applets https://dev.java/duke/

Engineers like to work from the bottom up because nature isn't made out of straight lines and regularity. Breaking things apart into abstractions works to a certain point, then the natural irregularity of reality steps in and you need to be able to react to that and adjust your foundation. So yes, fundamentally it is about thermodynamic knock-on-effects of handling things from the top-down.

Messing around with lisp and smalltalk environments is fun. But the moment you have to stick your hand beneath the surface, you can very quickly end up in someone else's overengineering hell. Most serious GNU Emacs users shudder at the thought of hitting Doom Emacs with a wrench until it suits their tastes. It's universally agreed that building your Emacs environment up from the defaults is fundamentally a wiser choice. Now realize that a full Lisp operating system is several orders of magnitude more complex than Doom Emacs, and most things you're going to program emacs to do are absolutely trivial in comparison to most industrial-grade application logic.

He was only describing hardware that was available at the time in businesses. Around that same time, Digital had a product called Pathworks that was very popular. All the PC's used standard unshielded twisted pair Ethernet. It wasn't that expensive. The Pathworks license was about $3,000 per VMS server though. This was great due to Windows NT didn't become popular until 3.51 in 1995 or so. Even then it was 100% interoperable with VMS LANMAN file servers and vice versa. NetWare 3.1 was also popular starting in 1991, although that far back the slim coax cable was still in use.

I seem to recall that early versions of Linux wouldn’t run on a cheap 386sx until the kernel started to incorporate embedded applications from widespread use in the late 90s. Also I remember the minimum ram was 4 meg but could go down to 2 meg if networking wasn’t installed even though it was built in to the kernel. Until the dot com boom, I don’t recall Linux being a partially flexible operating system. I think this is what kept windows 3.1 and ms-dos going until the late 90s

Coming from Commodore Amiga, my first PC was a 486dx with 4MB to run Linux. I did set it up the same day I bought it - noticed 4MB was not enough to run XFree86 on top of Linux 0.99.6 or whatever, so I grumbled, checked my wallet and bank account, went back to the dealer and asked him to take back the 4MB memory and sell me 16MB of RAM.

I was a student and ate only very cheap food the rest of that month.

Oh, and a bit later (two or three years) Tanenbaum visited my University and held a lecture about Amoeba.

> I seem to recall that early versions of Linux wouldn’t run on a cheap 386sx until the kernel started to incorporate embedded applications from widespread use in the late 90s.

I ran Linux on a 486SX with 4MB RAM in early 1994. Prior to that (1993?) I had been running 386BSD. Both OSes ran quite well on that hardware: certainly sh, vi, gcc, and make ran well, and what else do you really need?

4MB wasn't good enough for X Windows, but I had a VT102 connected to a serial port so that I could have two terminal sessions going at the same time.

Was only a $329 (1984 USD) for an 3Com Ethernet ISA network adapter card at Fey's Electronics.

Or about 2 months revenue of newspaper route.

Linux 0.98 shortly afterward and Donald Becker's Ethernet driver.

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