Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer

Re:Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s ... by jacquesm on Saturday June 18, 2016 @05:30PM (#11930692)

I have some hope that with the end of Moore's law in sight we will finally be able to concentrate on the software for some progress. All that we've achieved to date seems to be prettier way to squander cycles.

And in a way that's a real pity. It could have been that if Moore's law had been a doubling in 30 years rather than 18 months that we'd have had a lot more appreciation for writing good software. As it was the crap won out over the good stuff simply by being bailed out by Moore's law just in time for the next cycle.

But in some alternate universe hardware progress was so slow that any gains had to come from better software.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s ... by digi_owl on Sunday June 19, 2016 @03:26AM (#11932144)

> All that we've achieved to date seems to be prettier way to squander cycles.

And stack turtles.

Whenever i see a headline about unikernels, i envision doom running on DOS in a VM on top of Linux on top of some hardware somewhere. How many layers of (potentially leaky) abstractions are we looking at?

[ Parent | on HN ]