"What We Have Lost" -- 3C talk
Wow. This is possibly the nerdiest talk I have ever seen, but it is very relevant to my own interests, especially my FOSDEM 2018 talk.
The talk takes very quick looks at Symbolics Genera and OpenGenera and then compares it to Interlisp-D - or as they compare them, "west coast and east coast takes on the Lisp Machine context". That's a powerful comment right there. They draw comparisons between Interlisp-D and Smalltalk, although I do not see a lot of direct resemblance myself, but that is an interesting point. Another interesting factoid is that Interlisp-D is now open source, and efforts are afoot to modernise it.
Then it moves on to BTRON, which I'd never met before. BTRON is still available. It's the desktop iteration of the TRON family, which is doubtless by far the most widely-used operating system you've never heard of. iTRON is used in millions of embedded roles in Japanese consumer electronics and there are also real-time and server products. It has tens to hundreds of millions of instances out there.
And it concludes with IBM i, formerly known as IBM OS/400 for the AS/400 minicomputer range. This is the only surviving single-level store OS in the world (as far as I know; I welcome corrections!) and although it's very much a niche server OS it therefore is also a pointer to a future of PMEM-only computers which just have nonvolatile RAM and dispense with the 1960s concept of "disk drives" and "second level storage" - i.e. the concept behind every other OS you've ever heard of, of any form whatsoever.
Direct link if the embedded video doesn't work.
The talk takes very quick looks at Symbolics Genera and OpenGenera and then compares it to Interlisp-D - or as they compare them, "west coast and east coast takes on the Lisp Machine context". That's a powerful comment right there. They draw comparisons between Interlisp-D and Smalltalk, although I do not see a lot of direct resemblance myself, but that is an interesting point. Another interesting factoid is that Interlisp-D is now open source, and efforts are afoot to modernise it.
Then it moves on to BTRON, which I'd never met before. BTRON is still available. It's the desktop iteration of the TRON family, which is doubtless by far the most widely-used operating system you've never heard of. iTRON is used in millions of embedded roles in Japanese consumer electronics and there are also real-time and server products. It has tens to hundreds of millions of instances out there.
And it concludes with IBM i, formerly known as IBM OS/400 for the AS/400 minicomputer range. This is the only surviving single-level store OS in the world (as far as I know; I welcome corrections!) and although it's very much a niche server OS it therefore is also a pointer to a future of PMEM-only computers which just have nonvolatile RAM and dispense with the 1960s concept of "disk drives" and "second level storage" - i.e. the concept behind every other OS you've ever heard of, of any form whatsoever.
Direct link if the embedded video doesn't work.