"Computers"
Published on 2025/02/14 | Revised on 2025-03-09
I try not to post anything technical on this site, I do on bauherren
Excerpts from Rob Pike's interview with usesthis.com with minimal commentary from me
"I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve"
Me to. But I don't want to saddle someone with all my data
I'm sure they're happy to sift through it...
"Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that"
"Twenty years ago, you expected a phone to be provided everywhere you went, and that phone worked the same everywhere. At a friend's house, or a restaurant, or a hotel, or a pay phone, you could pick up the receiver and make a call. You didn't carry a phone around with you; phones were part of the infrastructure. Computers, well, that was a different story"
Very cool
The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere
You work at google.
I would allow the setup to force me to carry a computer screen around, as long as it rolled up and fit inside something the size of a pen and had touch input when unrolled. As long as it had no local storage.
YES