This talk looks pretty epic. I'm glad this discussion is being injected into the mainstream. I wish every one had an opportunity to use a network computing environment such as MIT Athena once in their lives. The original plan wasn't simply to grant blanket licenses for science and simulation software to users in the academic community. But create a true edtech platform that could be used to learn anything: languages, design, entrepreneurship, etc.
We've been talking about doing a follow-on talk this year focusing on network computing environments. Plan 9 and Apollo DomainOS are likely to make appearances, but more ideas are welcome.
"Long before Facebook's and Google's founders were born, and before Microsoft and Apple were founded. Before Xerox PARC. Before the Web. AOL. Bulletin boards and CompuServe. Before the Internet. Long before MOOCs (massively open online courses). Before pretty much everything we take for granted today, there was the PLATO system: home of not only computer-based education but, surprisingly, the first online community, and the original incubator for social computing: instant messaging, chat rooms, message forums, the world's first online newspaper, interactive fiction, emoticons, animations, virtual goods and virtual economies, a thriving developer community, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), personal publishing, screen savers. PLATO is where flat-panel gas plasma displays come from, and was one of the first systems with touch panels built-in to the screen. Countless other innovations." [1]
The book 'The Friendly Orange Glow' by Brian Dear details all about it. He says it's "a book in the works for more than two decades. Based on extensive research, including interviews with hundreds of key individuals who designed, built, managed, sold, and used the PLATO system."
KeyKOS (and relatives) somehow got my attention a little while back, and seem like they might be somewhere in the space of things you'd find interesting.
I'm not sure how available/installable they are nowadays, but some of their ideas live on in L4 microkernels, apparently.
I never really explored AFS sufficiently to understand why this was the case, but I was always surprised it (or a similar mechanism) was not available in corporate offices.
"Clear everything off of SharePoint you don't need, we're running out of room."
"The shared drive is full, we're going to purge everything not in one of the special directories. See the list."
AFS, as used at my university in the 00s, nicely reduced this problem by greatly expanding the amount of storage capacity available. It also helped speed up access to data by moving it to the system you were working on (assuming it was also an AFS node and not your personal device, in which case it was exactly like accessing a remote disk). It also helped with the "SharePoint is down again because even though we're a multibillion dollar corporation we're too cheap to hire real IT staff and Bob the Build Engineer tasked with keeping it up is on vacation." Local copies of data remained accessible.
> I was always surprised [AFS] (or a similar mechanism) was not available in corporate offices.
In some ways it was self-fulfilling - corporate offices didn't use it, so there wasn't a great ecosystem, so corporate offices did not use it.
There were a handful of vendors, all with drawbacks. On a large network, AFS, or particular cells or filesystems could get into a weird state. It was not like Solaris NFS where most senior sysadmins understood the filesystem error states.
You want to feel you are putting data into something safe, permanent and always accessible, and AFS never felt like that in corporate environments I was in.
Haven’t heard AFS mentioned in years. I was co-admin of a SunSITE back in the early 2000s and we used AFS for mirroring. Whilst it was quite neat, it was quite complex, especially due to the underlying intricacies of Kerberos. It would be great to have a more modern version of AFS with its distributed nature, central name spaces etc but with a truly open, horizontally scalable distributed file system.
