Computers, monocultures, and history. Simon Phipps has a good post with some other
postings related to monocultures.
Today's computing environment is far more monocultural than is being
discussed. It's not only the monoculture of Microsoft operating
systems. It's a monoculture of statically typed languages derived from
a C base. It's an operating systems monoculture where most of the ideas
are derived or recycled from Unix. It's a hardware monoculture that
results in hardware that is optimized to run C programs.
When I got started in computing, there was much more diversity
of hardware architecture, operating systems, and programming languages.
I frequently find myself longing for those days, and part of what you
see in my blog is hearkening back into the history of computing to
remind you that much of what's new has already been old, and that some
of what is yet to be new, may also already have been old. That's not to
say that we haven't made any progress, but maybe it's just a longwinded
way of saying that those who ignore history are doomed to reinvent it
badly.
Chris Csziksentmihalyi appears on the critical technical
practices links page that Simon referenced (unfortunately, I couldn't
get to his RPI pages, and his Media Lab pages are a maze that didn't
yield the information I was looking for). Chris' work includes bulding
technical artifacts that could have existed in an alternate history of
technology.
If we took the manufacturing techniques that are used to
produce today's high end PC's and workstations, and tried to go back in
time to those days of diversity, what would we end up building? Given
that we're talking about multiple processor cores on a chip, and
hundreds of gigabytes of storage, and incredible rendering performance,
would the assumptions that led to C/UNIX and their descendents still
hold? It's too bad is commercially infeasible to find out. [Ted Leung on the air]
9:49:40 AM 
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