Re:Ask HN: What are forgotten topics in computing that deser...
by chubot on Friday November 06, 2026 @11:58AM
(#50394960)
Right, there is line of research that seems to have been nearly obliterated from memory, mostly for economic reasons. The cloud model is a more profitable flywheel -- it lets the platform keep control, charge money, and then use the money to develop more features.
On the other hand, I would say there are still technical and fundamental reasons we're not using something like Plan 9, not just economic ones:
- Plan 9 was designed for LANs, not WANs. HTTP became the protocol of WANs, and the protocol of a (load balanced) client-server architecture, rather than something more peer-to-peer. So I believe that any of the systems you mentioned wouldn't be deployable that widely.
(Though it's true that k8s is almost always deployed within a single fast cloud network too)
- Network deployment mechanisms like captive portals at hotels had to arise, which would limit a more peer-to-peer architecture. Also NAT forwarding.
- The software world moves fast, and upgrading and compatibility are fundamentally hard problems. The cloud providers pay armies of SREs a lot of money to do this. The result is not what I like, but I have to admit they do a better job than what I do for self-hosted services!
So centralization does have inherent technical advantages. I'd like to think that there's some way around that :-)
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A related point is that Apple invested in Bonjour / zeroconf back in the day, but I feel like a lot of the functionality and mindshare has been lost to the cloud.
On the other hand, I would say there are still technical and fundamental reasons we're not using something like Plan 9, not just economic ones:
- Plan 9 was designed for LANs, not WANs. HTTP became the protocol of WANs, and the protocol of a (load balanced) client-server architecture, rather than something more peer-to-peer. So I believe that any of the systems you mentioned wouldn't be deployable that widely.
(Though it's true that k8s is almost always deployed within a single fast cloud network too)
- Network deployment mechanisms like captive portals at hotels had to arise, which would limit a more peer-to-peer architecture. Also NAT forwarding.
- The software world moves fast, and upgrading and compatibility are fundamentally hard problems. The cloud providers pay armies of SREs a lot of money to do this. The result is not what I like, but I have to admit they do a better job than what I do for self-hosted services!
So centralization does have inherent technical advantages. I'd like to think that there's some way around that :-)
---
A related point is that Apple invested in Bonjour / zeroconf back in the day, but I feel like a lot of the functionality and mindshare has been lost to the cloud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_(software)
I guess I do use this with Linux now! But for my case, it's fairly bare bones and doesn't feel that robust / debuggable.