"The Circuit Less Travelled" -- #FOSDEM 2018 "History" stream talk, notes & slides
So, yesterday I presented my first conference talk since the Windows Show 1996 at Olympia, where I talked about choosing a network operating system - that is, a server OS - for PC Pro magazine.
(I probablystill have the speaker's notes and presentation for that somewere too. The intensely curious may ask and I maybe able share it too.)
It seemed to go OK, I had a whole bunch of people asking questions afterwards, commenting or thanking me.
[Edit] Video! https://youtu.be/jlERSVSDl7Y
I have to check out the video recording and make some editing marks before it will be published and I am not sure that the hotel wifi connection is fast or capacious enough for me to do that. However, I'll post it as soon as I can.
Meantime, here is some further reading.
I put together a slightly jokey deck of slides and was very pleasantly impressed at how good and easy LibreOffice Impress made it to create and to present them. You can download the 9MB ODP file here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xmmz5r5zfmnqyzm/The%20circuit%20less%20travelled.odp?dl=0
The notes are a 110 kB MS Word 2003 document. They may not always be terribly coherent -- some were extensively scripted, some are just bullet points. For best results, view in MS Word (or the free MS Word Viewer, which runs fine under WINE) in Outline mode. Other programs will not show the structure of the document, just the text.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7b2e1xny53ckiei/The%20Circuit%20less%20travelled.doc?dl=0
I had to cut the talk fairly brutally to fit the time and did not get to discuss some of the operating systems I planned to. You can see some additional slides at the end of the presentation for stuff I had to skip.
Here's a particular chunk of the talk that I had to cut. It's called "Digging deeper" and you can see what I was goingto say about Taos, Plan 9, Inferno, QNX and Minix 3. This is what the slides on the end of the presentation refer to.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hstqmjy3wu5h28n/Part%202%20%E2%80%94%20Digging%20deeper.doc?dl=0
Links I mentioned in the talk or slides
The Unix Haters' Handbook [PDF]: https://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf
Stanislav Datskovskiy's Loper-OS: http://www.loper-os.org/
Paul Graham's essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/
Notably his Lisp Quotes: http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html
Steve Jobs on the two big things he missedwhen he visited Xerox PARC:
http://www.mac-history.net/computer-history/2012-03-22/apple-and-xerox-parc/2
Alan Kay interview where he calls Lisp "the Maxwell's Equations of software": https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
And what that means: http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/lisp-as-the-maxwells-equations-of-software/
"In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson: http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html
Author's page: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
Symbolics OpenGenera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)
How to run it on Linux (some of several such pages):
http://www.jachemich.de/vlm/genera.html
https://loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html
A brief (13min) into to OpenGenera by Kalman Reti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk&t=5s
A longer (1h9m) talk about it, also by him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBfB2MJw3qg