Put yourself in the shoes of someone who'd grown up on mainframes. The systems you're used to are fabulously expensive, sure, but their operating systems have sophisticated architectures that allow them to easily juggle multiple users running multiple programs while maintaining the security of the system overall. They are the completest expression ever realized of forty years of progress in the field of information technology.
Then, one day, someone drops a PC in your lap. You are horrified. It's a single-user, single-tasking system with absolutely nothing stopping the user from trashing everything by running the wrong program.
To you, this new... thing, whatever it is, is barely worth the name "computer." It feels more like a toy -- like something you would give to a child to play with. Certainly nobody would ever run critical systems on it, you think.
And here's the thing. You're absolutely right! All your concerns are one hundred percent valid. But it turns out that nobody cares; the PC is much, much cheaper, and it lets everyone have their own dedicated hardware right on their desk running any software they care to install, instead of time-sharing a mainframe and begging for permission each time they want to try a new program. Or, put more bluntly, it lets them escape from having to deal with the corporate IT priesthood (i.e. you) anymore.
The market speaks! You are derided as a pointy-headed nerd and swept into the dustbin of history.
Now fast forward ten or fifteen years. People start taking all those PCs they bought and hooking them together into networks... and suddenly all those things you were worried about back in the day come roaring back to bite them. Users discover that their machine stops talking to the network when they click and hold the mouse button, because the OS can't walk and chew gum at the same time. And the complete lack of security makes their machines super easy to compromise.
The PC vendors panic. They scramble to rewrite their old systems into systems that can live comfortably on a network. And when they're done, they roll out systems that look an awful lot like what you were insisting the baseline for a "real computer" was fifteen years ago. The world cheers and lines up to buy back all the sophistication they had happily thrown away before.
In other words, it's not so much that the IBMers were wrong, it's that they were early. When OS/2 arrived, the world didn't understand yet why it needed something like OS/2. And by the time it did, OS/2 didn't exist anymore. But in this business, being early is effectively the same thing as being wrong. The market doesn't give out points for foresight.
A beautiful thing is created. It is very expensive. It is sold to very few customers at very high margins. The very high margins subsidise the further perfection of the beautiful thing.
An ugly thing is created. It is very cheap. It is sold to very many customers at very low margins. The very large revenues subsidise the further papering-over of the flaws of the ugly thing.
Eventually, the ugly thing utterly supplants the beautiful thing. A few wistful old high priests mutter about the beautiful thing. Meanwhile, billions of dollars and millions of hours are wasted working around the flaws of the ugly thing and reinventing, poorly, the features of the beautiful thing.
Indeed; in fact I'd argue the market (and society in general) flat out punishes foresight, especially when it's right. What's that old Heinlein quote about Cassandra? And I think this is why so many nerds/engineers are "unsuccessful", at least by market definitions, or why they end up bitter: they'd rather be right than rich. Just look at the deriding RMS gets, and yet "Right to Read" has more or less come to pass.
This is very very true. I see the "multiple users" feature they introduced a few dot versions ago in Android and thought it was useful (perhaps?) but then they are implementing all of Linux's features on top of Linux.... makes me chuckle
There is a good reason for this though - to some extent Android treats every "app" as a separate unix user running in it's own account space, as I understand it.
Ah yes, it does. So I suppose it is good that Android is implementing this on top of it, but it still seems like massive effort to duplicate lower level features due to lack of foresight during initial Android system design.
To some extent I prefer the Android model. Cryptolocker has got me thinking about the security of my backups, and one uncomfortable realization is that it's quite difficult on any remote system to create a folder and say "I need to re-issue my password to use this folder" without making it owned by root.
(Although I'd be really happy to know if a "user-level sudo" is possible).
Like we native folks (mainframe) keep talking about those trying to stuff applications inside an application created for reading hypertext documents (pc).
> But in this business, being early is effectively the same thing as being wrong. The market doesn't give out points for foresight.
Unless you manage to survive and keep at it until the time turns out to be ripe. NeXT kinda-sorta did, 20 years down the road. It's an exception though, graveyards are full of great OS who didn't have the time to wait.
Regarding vulnerabilities, which many think (wrongly) are not present in mainframes, because they are networked nearly as much, and have massively fewer programs running on them, don't show up as much. But they are there.
Certainly, but it's also worth noting that the environments in which programs execute on most mainframes are much more restricted than those of even the typical servers of today, and have been by default for decades.
Somehow I'm not seeing the entire worlds financial system as being either un-networked or not an appealing target.
If you think skript kiddies on the other side of the planet are a difficult adversary, try inside jobs like corrupt fellow employees, now they're a worthy adversary.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who'd grown up on mainframes. The systems you're used to are fabulously expensive, sure, but their operating systems have sophisticated architectures that allow them to easily juggle multiple users running multiple programs while maintaining the security of the system overall. They are the completest expression ever realized of forty years of progress in the field of information technology.
Then, one day, someone drops a PC in your lap. You are horrified. It's a single-user, single-tasking system with absolutely nothing stopping the user from trashing everything by running the wrong program.
To you, this new... thing, whatever it is, is barely worth the name "computer." It feels more like a toy -- like something you would give to a child to play with. Certainly nobody would ever run critical systems on it, you think.
And here's the thing. You're absolutely right! All your concerns are one hundred percent valid. But it turns out that nobody cares; the PC is much, much cheaper, and it lets everyone have their own dedicated hardware right on their desk running any software they care to install, instead of time-sharing a mainframe and begging for permission each time they want to try a new program. Or, put more bluntly, it lets them escape from having to deal with the corporate IT priesthood (i.e. you) anymore.
The market speaks! You are derided as a pointy-headed nerd and swept into the dustbin of history.
Now fast forward ten or fifteen years. People start taking all those PCs they bought and hooking them together into networks... and suddenly all those things you were worried about back in the day come roaring back to bite them. Users discover that their machine stops talking to the network when they click and hold the mouse button, because the OS can't walk and chew gum at the same time. And the complete lack of security makes their machines super easy to compromise.
The PC vendors panic. They scramble to rewrite their old systems into systems that can live comfortably on a network. And when they're done, they roll out systems that look an awful lot like what you were insisting the baseline for a "real computer" was fifteen years ago. The world cheers and lines up to buy back all the sophistication they had happily thrown away before.
In other words, it's not so much that the IBMers were wrong, it's that they were early. When OS/2 arrived, the world didn't understand yet why it needed something like OS/2. And by the time it did, OS/2 didn't exist anymore. But in this business, being early is effectively the same thing as being wrong. The market doesn't give out points for foresight.