Liam Proven

A possible next evolutionary step for computers is persistent memory: large capacity non-volatile main memory. With a few terabytes of nonvolatile RAM, who needs an SSD any more? I will sketch out a proposal for how to build an versatile, general-purpose OS for a computer that doesn't need or use filesystems or files, and how such a thing could be built from existing FOSS code and techniques, using lessons from systems that existed decades ago and which inspired the computers we use today.

Since the era of the mainframe, all computers have used hard disks and at least two levels of storage: main memory, or RAM, and secondary or auxiliary storage: disk drives, accessed over some form of disk controller using a file system to index the contents of secondary storage for retrieval.

Technology such as Intel's 3D Xpoint -- sold under the brand name Optane -- and HP's future memristor storage will render this separation obsolete. When a computer's permanent storage is all right there in the processors' memory map, there is no need for disk controllers or filesystems. It's all just RAM.

It is very hard to imagine how existing filesystem-centric OSes such as Unix could be adapted to take full advantage of this, so fundamental are files and directories and metadata to how they operate. I will present the outline of an idea how to build an OS that natively uses such a computer architecture, based on existing technology and software, that the FOSS community is ideally situated to build and develop.

For as long as computers have been around, roughly every 10-15 years, the whole industry underwent a reset and reinvented itself anew… until the early 1990s, when somehow, the industry skipped a generation. Instead, it looked backwards, and adopted an older model of computing. The cost has been very high and is holding back the development of the entire field.

This talk looks at how we turned to the past instead of the future, what we missed out on as a result, and how to move forward. It follows on from the above proposal, but takes a different tack and should stand alone. It looks at where personal computers might have – but didn’t – go in the 1980s and 1990s. At a sampling of advanced OS technologies that never caught on – Plan 9, Inferno, Taos, Oberon – and the cool stuff we lost out on as a result.

It will end with trying to identify the next such generation gap, and why we should consider starting afresh rather than adapting current tech for the next gen.

Retrocomputing, lost lessons of software design, a quarter of a century of failed progress - and how learning from the past could lead to the next generation of computers.

There are many now-forgotten OSes and languages that could do things that modern systems can't even approach, but they are long gone, out-competed by inexpensive commodity computers and lowest-common-denominator software. This talk discusses some of that forgotten history, and how what we did instead has landed has landed us with significant problems... and some possible ways that we could escape these problems and find new ways forward.

It will touch upon Plan 9 and Inferno, Taos and Intent/Elate, the Dandelion machines and Mesa, Oberon, OpenGenera, Movitz, ChrysaLisp, Urbit, the Canon Cat, the original Newton OS and Dylan, and more besides. It will also examine the next big transition that we're facing, one that almost nobody has noticed and which existing OSes are ill-suited to handle -- and how learning from the past could help improve the future.