The 90s was peak desktop. Everything was on the local hard drive.
Now everything is back on the mainframe(cloud) i fully expect it to cycle back to the desktop in some form. (we just won’t call it that)
Edit: OMG! the term exists! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_computing
Every tech or bigco job i've had there's at least one mainframe codger doing the Kinge George "You'll be back" number from hamilton. Don't think they anticipated the non-MF cloud. Almost always among the best engineers though in the joint though, IME.
I miss genuine differences in hardware. Happy hour discussions about alpha vs sparc vs intel etc. I'm hopeful that diversity will come back around as a thing.
I miss genuine differences in hardware. Happy hour discussions about alpha vs sparc vs intel etc. I'm hopeful that diversity will come back around as a thing.
Can anyone recommend something quite a bit different that a guy could toy with? Or is this why everyone is having so much fun with 8 bit retrocomputers?
But a key problem with alternative OSes is that if you want to use them as daily drivers, your software choices may be limited or nonexistent. Haiku, for instance, has a WebKit-based browser, but no Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, or Safari.
I thought all I ever really did was VS Code, so I got code-server installed and everything else was mostly online anyway (Office 365, Exchange, Wordpress, etc), but the biggest pain point was the lack of a native terminal and ssh.
Even though VSCode has a great terminal built in, it seemed so wasteful to load into it just to open a terminal window.
After a couple of months, I just switched to MacOS, and still use my code-server install instead of VSCode, and 100% prefer it.
Hacker culture calls this the Wheel of Samsara.
Joke was on the proponents of this since web-apps bloated to require a damn super computer to run them with acceptable performance, until that YC/PG-backed startup that was posted on here recently came along selling mainframe-hosted-browsers-as-a-service-over-VNC.
And as you say, there's definitely a cycle between "everything local" and "everything central".
Well, now everyone are using Javascript and Python, and no one seems to be complaining.
The second point is true as well. No matter where the pendulum is at the moment, there are always going to be people trying to push it in the other direction. Sun was again ahead of the time by pushing the Javastation, which was trying to do what the Chromebooks are doing. Then there was the Sunray of course, which was really cool, but a bit too specialised.
Read more Hacker News and you'll see complaints about both languages.
The debate today is mostly AoT vs JIT compilers, I don't see anyone bring up VMs unless they're talking about how slow Python is.
I also don't see anyone bringing up "portability" anymore - compilers support all the architectures people care about, while libraries and APIs are designed to be platform agnostic as far as they can be while developers recognize there is no such thing as portable software (and where portable software is absolutely required, it shall run in the browser).
1. Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs). It's this forever cycle of "performance required" that shifts to "portability required", which lacks performance, and gradually shifts back, and repeat.
2. Local processing vs. dumb terminals and shared computing. The current "dumb terminal" phase being the idea that you can buy a $100 Chromebook and working entirely online.