The myth of the fall | Hacker News Reader

The myth of the fall

esr.ibiblio.org

129 pointsclarkm20 comments

The MIT AI Lab itself never found its way to that new world. There’s a reason the Emacs text editor is the only software artifact of that culture that survives to us, and it had to be rewritten from the ground up on the way.

It didn't come from MIT, but TeX is certainly an artifact of the same academic hacker culture. Knuth originally wrote it at SAIL to run on the local OS, WAITS. It was rewritten in Pascal, not C, to be portable to the wide range of operating systems out there in 1980.

(I understand that GNU info is also a reimplementation of MIT AI Lab software, which explains a lot.)

The culture of the MIT AI Lab which spawned Emacs is more specific than the "academic hacker culture" including Knuth.

Agreed, but SAIL was, if not strictly the same culture as the AI Lab, at least significantly connected to it.

> The Unix guys showed us the way out, by (a) inventing the first non-assembler language really suitable for systems programming, and (b) proving it by writing an operating system in it.

Not the first, see eg. Burroughs mainframes, early 60's.

JOVIAL was another language, used for systems programming on the militay side, predating C and proven.

Pascal was contemporary with C and UCSD p-System was released just 2 years later than Unix. It was also more portable and retargetable than Unix.

Another early system programming language: CMU Bliss. Bliss was used to develop operating systems within Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), including VMS / OpenVMS.

If anyone here is interested in experimenting with a Bliss compiler, there's one installed on the gein.vistech.net VMS server, and there are free accounts available there. Visit http://deathrow.vistech.net for account registration details.

FWIW, the UCSD P-System and p-code and the Pascal compiler was easily portable, but the tools were also very buggy (at least) on the Terak boxes, and — even for the era — very slow. Folks were always working around some bug or another, or some slowness.

It's not just bugs and slowness. At least in those days, Pascal had the size of an array as part of the type of the array. This meant that you could not have a variable-sized array, because you could not give it a type.

True story: I took over a numerical simulation on a 2D grid that ran slowly, because it implemented the 2D grid as a linked list. If you wanted to refer to the node directly below the current one, and the grid was 60x60, you had to follow 60 links to do it! I looked down on the guy who wrote it as being somehow hung up on linked lists, like it was his favorite data structure from school or something. Only later did I find out that he had no choice - he couldn't allocate a variable-sized array. So we re-wrote it to allocate the biggest array we had memory to hold, and to only use part of it.

But if we were trying to write a portable operating system, or something of that sort, our kludge would not have worked. Allocating the biggest possible size needed is not good behavior for an OS...

> This is why the earliest social experiments in what we would now call “open source” – at SHARE and DECUS – were restricted to individual vendors’ product lines and (often) to individual machine types.

Yes, because BASIC and Creative Computing magazine never happened.

Conflating the idea of sharing code, with the idea of sharing system level code doesn't really help this essay IMNHO.

As for the "creation myth" -- I guess that refers to stuff like: http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html

I'm not sure how this is supposed to be a "myth". As far as I can tell we went from relatively open systems (if not free) to much more closed systems. And now, after the rise of various standard platforms (x86, sparc, arm) we're in a strange (and a little scary) in-between place where we have oodles of great hardware, half of which we have no real idea how works, except for binary driver blobs.

I guess I just don't understand the motivation for tying together the fact that we've come a long way in terms of system and language design, and that because of that we've been able to get some pretty solid open systems -- and that closed systems aren't (and never was) a bad thing, because, you know *bsd and linux and stuff?

And there's of course stuff like: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....

While later than C, in some ways arguably more open than unix (as it was actually published and distributed).

Wrt. early social experiments: there clearly was a well-developed code-sharing community by the mid 1960s dealing with scientific computing in Fortran, with textbooks offering incremental refinements of programs to solve problems of shared interest, and there was some portability to such code, within constraints. But I think esr is talking about the emergence of a much more fluent kind of sharing, that needed much deeper portability and automated configuration, and much more direct peer-to-peer sharing of code, of the sort that the emerging connected networks that were to become the internet offered. What you are talking about resembles the early Fortran sharing more than it resembles the Unix-centric sharing.

The motivation for the tying you talk of is that it is this kind of code sharing that has really liberated hackers from the grip of proprietary computing. The Fortran and Basic -style of sharing still left hackers with considerable lock-in to the computing environment they were currently using.

Well, I can sort of read that into the article too, but it doesn't actually make that argument coherently nor explicitly...

"> This is why the earliest social experiments in what we would now call “open source” – at SHARE and DECUS – were restricted to individual vendors’ product lines and (often) to individual machine types. Yes, because BASIC and Creative Computing magazine never happened."

Claiming late '70s work as "earliest" does sorta miss when SHARE and DECUS were founded - 1955(!) and 1961, respectively.

No matter how valid some of these arguments may or may not be, this is like the nth time ESR has had to make this sort of point, which is basically to attempt to lessen the cultural impact of RMS and the other MIT AI guys.

Like, we get it dude. 30+ years later you're still upset that you didn't get into MIT and weren't part of the MIT/CMU/SAIL crowd. Steven Levy didn't mention you in Hackers and called RMS "the last true hacker" -- we get it, you're still butthurt. But seriously dude, move the fuck on...

Would you care to explain why this analysis of history is/is not compelling, and would you care to cite those comments about ESR's butthurt?

Bill Gates was sarcastic to ESR at some conference in the 80s, and that's where his visceral hatred of MS comes from. That combined with his pathological attention seeking. If we ignore him maybe he'll go away.

I may dislike esr as much as the next fellow, but your response is degrading noise. It wasn't esr who upvoted the link here to the point of your visibility, it was people who found it interesting. If you're annoyed by that, flag, filter, stop reading the site, whatever, but this sort of armchair psychoanalyzing says more about you than esr.

As usual, ESR gives us quite a few factual errors and misrepresentations in order to try to elevate himself at RMS’s expense.

The reason is brutally simple: software wasn’t portable!

Uhh, CP/M? More gibberish from ESR.

The myth of the fall is that we imagine we were at a higher place than we are now according to this, but I would say it's not that black and white. In between proprietary products, the foss culture soared, and during years of proprietary product releases, it was relegated to the hacker and academic realms (as opposed to consumer).

Let's not forget that the BSD (Net1) debacle didn't even start till about 89 and Linux didn't show up till, what, 91? There is a huge time gap between the origins of the open source culture and the practical availability for tinkerers.

Also, please, please don't forget the influence of Minix in this (also not till 87). sidenote: If you weren't aware, Minix 3 is now BSD licensed, and I find it as a ray of hope for the future (10k lines of kernel code vs what, 10mil in linux now? Let's admit it, linux is getting out of control of the open source review principle... but I digress.)

The real gem of this article is the end:

"We didn’t get here because we failed in our duty to protect a prelapsarian software commons, but because we succeeded in creating one."

What that really means is that although open source got us to where we are today, we are still in a very precarious position. "Prelapsarian" is right. We are in a time where the potential for a lapse back to proprietary is far too strong at the moment, and honestly while I understand the arguments between BSD and GPL, I think history has shown that BSD is far too easily abused (Apple/Windows netstacks, etc), and RMS will in the future history books either be considered a visionary ahead of his time or wiped from the pages of history due to the totalitarianism in effect.

Software is a social issue, there is no way around that fact, and we ignore it at our peril.

(one more sidenote: I think one of the main threats of proprietary these days is, that as open source/foss takes over, it becomes the backend blob that everyone ignores and forgets about. See: GSM stack, etc. We need to keep FOSS close to the hardware)

The main threat to open-sores software right now is the 'net, and customer expectations. We have all cultivated business models that are predicated on sharecropping of walled gardens, and trained users to solely desire that sort of relationship and accompanying functionality.

Don't miss the first three comments at the end:

Jay Maynard (yeah, that Tron costume guy+) - "Not only did RMS have to co-opt Unix technology, he bathed about it, as well." ""bathed"??!?!! Damned auto-correct. That was supposed to be "bitched"."

Patrick Maupin: "Yeah, we all knew RMS didn't do that..."

(RMS is not well known for exceptional personal hygiene.)

+ https://www.google.com.au/search?q=Jay+Maynard&safe=off&espv...

Come on downvoters, you saw "safe=off" in the link, didn't you?

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