After Announcing Plans To Destroy Microsoft Windows, HP CEO Pulls A Gutsy Move

I care if it runs a Unix-like operating system. As an engineer, my life is made so much easier when standard Unix stuff is available. And I'm rather miserable when I have to rewrite something to account for the absence of standard Unix stuff.

For end-users, a Unix-like system can be perfectly usable. OS X runs on Darwin, which has slightly less Unix support than I'd prefer, but still waaaay more so than Windows. Ubuntu is, in my opinion, just as easy for the non-technical to learn as Windows or OS X.

Given the benefits to developers, and the absence of a downside for end-users, I see no reason not to root for Unix on The Machine.

Now, it doesn't have to use the Linux kernel, GNU utilities, or any of the other familiar building blocks. It just has to act like systems that do.

Memristor's aren't the only interesting thing--they also said it would use new optical interconnect techology, which would contribute much of the speed and energy efficiency improvements.

Are these going to be expensive server computers? I would think so for the first several years. They must be high-margin machines for HP to throw money at it.

Anyway, what kind of a market would there be for Windows in this market? There's a Windows supercomputer OS but it don't think it's used much, for example.

I think HP has a bigger vision here. They aren't looking to build a new car, only this car has electric batteries, they want to build a plane. They announced two OS projects: a modified version of Linux that runs on this new machine, and an entirely new operating system based on fundamentally different assumptions. They only care about Linux as a stopgap, because it allows people to start using this machine while they come up with something better.

From a familiarity point of view so do I but progress in operating systems and languages hasn't moved on much for decades. Linux is the pragmatic solution for now and for some time to come but if my kids' kids are still using vim on a unix-like system to create software in a c-like language for an Intel compatible CPU architecture I am happy to entertain the possibility that we may have fucked up somewhere.

We badly need a Xerox Parc again doing stuff because they can and not because they must. So much technology came out of places like that and Bell Labs and we seem to have lost that.

> I just want it to be Linux.

You shouldn't.

Linux is a member of a long lineage of operating systems that assume centralized processors connected by a slow bus to volatile memory that only temporarily holds information that needs to be backed up by other devices connected to buses much slower than memory. Every OS in current use is based on these ideas that haven't changed much since the 60's.

If you want, you may imagine Smalltalk running directly on metal with no OS underneath it, with all your data being just part of the image you work with. This is the kind of machine that this makes possible. This was, of course, done in the 80's with technology that was barely sufficient.

HPUX is light years ahead of Linux on workload management, seriously. HP have an amazing portfolio of OSs, HPUX, OpenVMS, Domain/OS, NonStop, etc. Linux is the lowest common denominator, in 2014 it's barely where these were in 1994...

What were the enterprise tools?

hp was often really good for hardware, sometimes also for software.

I use an HP EliteBook 8570w every day. It's an excellent developer box. It's very fast, reliable, and easy to upgrade with off the shelf components and it's a very good value. Even with 24GB of RAM and 500GB SSD drive it's cheaper than a comparable Macbook and I can add another drive and increase the memory if I want; I also made these upgrades as I needed them. It's heavy and not as attractive as a Macbook or other aluminum framed notebooks (HP has those too though).

They run the computers with screens on Windows. All the servers and rack-mounted stuff is mostly Linux these days, as far as I know.

It's a sad fact that the two dominant OSs these days are a copy of Unix and the bastard child of VMS.

I'd love to see some fresh approaches to this old problem.

And aapl and ibm.

I think it is more of a dig on academic operating systems research, which some say hasn't made any major breakthroughs since the 1980's, possibly because we have been stuck on the same architecture for so long.

IMO, the focus on Windows vs UNIX/Linux or HP vs MS is really missing the point though. If you build a computer as they are suggesting, using non-volatile memory without a deep memory hierarchy, and with an optical interconnect that enables low-latency memory access across a datacenter, then that changes a huge number of the assumptions that led to the operating systems we have now. In order to really take advantage of such a machine, you really need to invent new operating systems. You can hack Linux to run on it, which is what they said they are doing, but you will lose some of the benefits of the hardware because the architecture assumptions are baked into the fundamental design of existing OSes. File systems are one example that is easy to think about. Virtual memory. But consider anything that an OS does and how this new architecture changes it. Consider loading executables to start a process, for example. If there is no difference between memory and disk, then you don't even need to load executables into memory. All files would be memory-mapped in some huge global address space. Programs could jump from memory in one machine to a whole different machine (VM migration? HA?). It really changes everything. We would need new R&D, some of it very fundamental, in order to understand and build systems to take full advantage of such technology. That's all HP is saying in this announcement.

Not quite.

Windows, like Linux, assumes a certain architecture: one or more processors connected to volatile memory that holds transient data and much slower persistent storage that is required to preserve a consistent state for long periods.

You don't see "Windows for D-Wave computers" and you won't see "Windows for HP's The Machine".

Any new OS will have to, at least, have a POSIX API if it wants to be used from day one, but, from that point, HP is free to invent.

I wish them luck.

Memristors are new technology considering that you can't buy a computer that uses memristors yet.

Well, if you go further down the memory lane you'll see that it was HP that fired the first shot.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/webos-...

Look at Lenovo which is actually innovating instead of resting on its laurels like HP and churning out the same cookie cutter crap year after year and expecting profit to stay up. The Surface is a red herring, actual innovation is still rewarded, for example see the Lenovo Yoga line of laptops.

http://www.cnet.com/news/lenovo-earnings-soar-on-solid-pc-sm...

Maybe it's an indirect reference to the all encompassing Machine in E.M. Forster's story:

http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

The head of HP Labs explained this in his talk. He said it is called "the machine" because 1) they are researchers, not marketing people, and 2) they started thinking of it as not just another server, but a whole new architecture that scales from phones to data centers (as in, THE machine, the only one you need).

How would you rebuild Windows into something that runs on a machine where there is no volatile memory and no distinction between memory and persistent storage?

Whatever results from this would only be called Windows for marketing reasons.

> Wait, the same HP that tossed aside PalmOS?

No. That was Leo Apotheker, the Idiot.

> The same HP that gave us HP-UX?

You may not like HP-UX, but it does some of the neatest tricks in workload management I've ever seen.

Leo happened ;)