Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 25th, 2021

Coder’s Block

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 25th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on October 25th included Brigid Gaffikin, Tom Lyon, MattSci, Simeon Miteff, Edwin Peer, Ian, Nima Johari, Matt Campbell, Joshua Hoeflich, Bill, Ariel Machado, and Kendall Morgan. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• BattleTris stories
• [@10:15](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=615) Writer’s block, flow (instigating tweet)
• National Novel Writing Month NaNoWriMo
• Flow wiki
• [@16:54](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=1014) “If you’re just problem solving, you can’t have writers block” 
  • Many degrees of freedom
  • Shiny new object
• [@20:39](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=1239) Remedies for writer’s block? 
  • Decide if you’re looking for tactics or strategy; is it small technical issues or not?
  • Tactics: Hone in on ‘the craft’ – work on the language
  • Strategy: Is this going to reach an audience/get an agent?
  • Write a scene from a different character’s PoV; write a vignette
  • This sounds like prototyping in software
  • If you’re stuck on debugging, write some debug infrastructure
• [@24:16](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=1456) Doing something else entirely 
  • Brigid: ceramics, sound walks
• [@27:43](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=1663) Not everything is burnout
• [@34:13](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=2053) Software analogies to writer’s techniques
• [@36:04](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=2164) Personal productivity obsession 
  • Writer Emergency Pack by John August, site
  • “You’ve got to get back to the coal face. You’ve got to finish it.”
• [@41:00](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=2460) Does Rust make this indecision worse? 
  • Pressure to find the “right” way
• [@43:56](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=2636) Arthur Whitney (wiki) > The best analog for software is poetry
• Pandemic life, collaboration and conferences
• [@51:51](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=3111) Hallway track. Software is collaborative but ultimately programming is a solitary act 
  • Nimo’s experience, it’s all collaborative. Code review, art
• [@59:36](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=3576) Cliff code reviews, how to do good reviews 
  • Lack of code reviewers for Rust at Google
• [@1:04:16](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=3856) Writer’s groups, different focuses
• [@1:08:04](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=4084) Grad school during pandemic, gather.town - video chat platform for virtual interactions
• [@1:11:54](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=4314) Goals, take the wins that you can, boundaries between work life and home life
• Kendall Morgan “Thoughts on Code Reviews” blog post
• [@1:17:38](https://youtu.be/QGs5hlH6cLk?t=4658) Bill’s experience switching things up, and enjoying computing again
• Wrap up tweet

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 18th, 2021

Dijkstra’s Tweetstorm

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 18th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on October 18th included Edwin Peer, Dan Cross, Ryan Zezeski, Tom Lyon, Aaron Goldman, Simeon Miteff, MattSci, Nate, raycar5, night, and Drew Vogel. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Dijkstra’s 1975 “How do we tell truths that might hurt?” EWD 498 tweet > PL/1 > belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: October 4th, 2021

Economics and Open Source

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for October 4th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on October 4th included Edwin Peer, James Todd, Peter Corless, Matt Campbell, jasonbking, Simeon Miteff, Josh Clulow, Ian, Joe Thompson, Dan Cross, Tom Lyon, Tim Burnham, and vint serp. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Mark Jones Lorenzo (2017) Endless Loop: The History of the BASIC Programming Language book
  • John Kemeny wiki
• [@3:11](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=191) Tim’s excellent tweet
  • William Gibson wiki
  • John Browne (1996) The Bug Count Also Rises short story
• [@5:38](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=338) Growing up with BASIC
• [@8:03](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=483) Braille ’n Speak PDA (intro video), BASIC programming
• TI-BASIC language
• [@10:39](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=639) Speaking program reading off system calls in real time 
  • snoop could output to /dev/audio
• [@13:39](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=819) Joel Spolsky (2002) Strategy Letter V blog
  • Bryan’s (2004) The Economics of Software blog
  • Software “maintenance”
• [@20:02](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=1202) Cathedral and the Bazaar, wiki
  • “Forkophilic” development model and the Alan Cox -ac Linux tree
• [@26:07](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=1567) Open source as something in the commercial best interest of a business 
  • SCO v IBM wiki
  • Halloween documents wiki
  • Steve Ballmer’s “Linux is a cancer” quote in the Chicago Sun-Times
  • OpenOffice.org wiki (open sourced from StarOffice)
• [@30:29](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=1829) Document editing as a service. Services and open source
• Richard Stallman on SaaS
• [@33:34](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=2014) The Joel Test link
  • Joel’s (2007) Strategy Letter VI blog
  • “Everybody wants to be a platform”
• [@38:58](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=2338) Joel’s take on Sun 
  • Making the pie larger. Porting NFS to rival platforms
  • The Sun Network Filesystem: Design, Implementation and Experience has a section on porting experiences.
  • Monetizing software - “Sun could never monetize software, only hardware”
• [@44:44](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=2684) Window toolkits, “cross platform”, write once run anywhere
• “Write once, debug everywhere”
• What’s the directory separator on MVS? or Stratos VOS?
• [@51:40](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=3100) James’ experience working on Tomcat 
  • Joel’s (2002) Lord Palmerston on Programming blog
  • Graphics toolkits, Electron/Web vs Native
• [@1:05:21](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=3921) “OpenSolaris downloads are potential buyers for the ZFS appliance”
• [@1:06:17](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=3977) Jason Hoffman “The Sun does not shine on me” 
  • Strategy cannot make up for poor execution
  • Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz didn’t travel to meet customers
  • Demoing to a hostile audience
  • “Asteroid named Linux on a collision course” tweet
• [@1:13:20](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=4400) Open-core, AWS services, monetizing open source 
  • “People will pay for a service”
  • Could Apple open source?
• [@1:18:43](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=4723) Packaged solutions; giving mom a linux box. Free software: free for whom? 
  • Support relationships. People want support
• [@1:22:05](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=4925) Why didn’t Sun embrace Linux? 
  • ZFS on Linux, Ubuntu
  • The Sourceware Operating System Proposal – Larry McVoy’s open source SunOS 4 proposal.
  • Sun bought Cobalt wiki
• [@1:25:33](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=5133) “The writing was on the wall for Sun..” 
  • x86 price-performance
  • “Couldn’t you buy like 100 x86 computers for that price?”
  • RISC machine in-fighting, while Intel undercuts the market
• [@1:31:01](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=5461) Josh’s work on frustrating hardware configuration
• [@1:33:25](https://youtu.be/JDd8xGSP9DA?t=5605) Peter’s experience as a Sun customer 
  • Vertical scaling, but not so much horizontal scaling
  • Clusters of cheap commodity hardware outperforming big multiway boxes
  • Importance of open source for big internet companies
  • Traders used Sun workstations, for fast trading
• [@1:38:39](ht...

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: September 27th, 2021

The Books in the Box

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for September 27th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on September 27th included Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, Antranig Vartanian Simeon Miteff Matt Campbell, Jeremy Tanner, Joshua Clulow, Ian, Tim Burnham, and Nathaniel Reindl. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Not recommended :-( 
  • Dave Hitz and Pat Walsh (2008) How to Castrate a Bull book
  • Peter Thiel (2014) Zero to One book
• [@2:45](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=165) David Jacques Gerber (2015) The Inventor’s Dilemma: The Remarkable Life of H. Joseph Gerber book
• [@7:21](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=441) Sidney Dekker (2011) Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems book
• [@13:08](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=788) Robert Buderi (1996) The Invention that Changed the World: The Story of Radar from War to Peace book
  • MIT Rad Lab Series info
  • Nuclear Magnetic Resonance wiki
  • Richard Rhodes (1995) Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb book
  • Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson (1997) Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age book
  • Craig Canine (1995) Dream Reaper: The Story of an Old-Fashioned Inventor in the High-Tech, High-Stakes World of Modern Agriculture book
  • David Fisher and Marshall Fisher (1996) Tube: The Invention of Television book
  • Michael Hiltzik (2015) Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex book
• [@18:05](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1085) Ben Rich and Leo Janos (1994) Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed book
• Network Software Environment
• Lockheed SR-71 on display at the Sea, Air and Space Museum in NYC.
• [@26:52](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1612) Brian Dear (2017) The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture book
• [@30:15](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1815) Randall Stross (1993) Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing book
• [@32:21](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1941) Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock (2010) Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor book
• [@33:06](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=1986) Lamont Wood (2012) Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution book
• Charles Kenney (1992) Riding the Runaway Horse: The Rise and Decline of Wang Laboratories book
  • Tom’s tweet
• [@34:06](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=2046) Bryan’s Lost Box of Books!
• Edgar H. Schein et al (2003) DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation book
• [@36:56](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=2216) Alan Payne (2021) Built to Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster’s Inevitable Bust book
  • Videotape format war wiki
• Hackers (1995) movie. Watch the trailer ~2mins
• Steven Levy (1984) Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution book
• [@42:32](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=2552) Paul Halmos (1985) I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography book
• Paul Hoffman (1998) The Man Who Loved Only Numbers about Paul Erdős book
• 1981 text adventure game for the Apple II by Sierra On-Line, “Softporn Adventure” (wiki)
• [@49:16](https://youtu.be/zrZAHO89XGk?t=2956) Douglas Engelbart The Mother of All Demos wiki
  • John Markoff (2005) What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry book
• Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon (1998) Where Wizards Stay Up Late book
• 1972 Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing documentary ~26mins (wiki) included big names like Corbató, Licklider and Bob Kahn.
• Gordon Moore (1965) Cramming more components onto integrated circuits paper and Moore’s Law wiki
• [@52:3...

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: September 20th, 2021

Theranos, Silicon Valley, and the March Madness of Tech Fraud

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for September 20th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on September 20th included Land Belenky, Toasterson, Cole Frederick, and Simeon Miteff. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• John Carreyrou on Theranos 
  • “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup” 2018 book
  • “Bad Blood the Final Chapter” podcast as the trial proceeds (announcement), on apple, spotify
• Cole’s tweet linking to a ~5min video of a would-be Theranos competitor commenting on its collapse > The lone inventor is a dangerous impression to give people.
• Related: Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman “The Myth of the Genius Programmer” 2009 talk ~55mins
• [@9:47](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=587) Companies that drive scientific people nuts 
  • uBeam “claims to be developing a wireless charging system to work via ultrasound. Scientists have strongly criticised the plausibility under physics of this proposal.”
  • uBiome > To innovate, you have to balance the world as it is with the world as it isn’t.
• [@13:44](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=824) Theranos’ fantastical vision. European attitudes around business and innovation. 
  • PCR Polymerase chain reaction invented 1983 by Kary Mullis.
• [@18:39](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=1119) Fake it till you make it? 
  • Optative voice > The secrecy of Theranos should have been a red flag
• [@23:57](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=1437) Whistleblower Avie Tevanian. Smoke and mirrors, giving the board the run around.
• [@29:05](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=1745) “Everyone was relying on someone else to do their due diligence” 
  • Tech risk, venture capital
  • Cerebras Systems wafer scale processors
  • Ellen Pao NYT editorial “The Elizabeth Holmes Trial is a Wake-up Call for Sexism in Tech”
• [@35:20](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=2120) Software cure-all 
  • 737 MAX failures
• [@40:14](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=2414) Founding myths 
  • Jean-Louis Gassée
    • 2015 “Theranos Trouble: A First Person Account” blog
    • 2018 “Theranos Could Have Been Stopped” blog
• [@44:06](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=2646) Tesla “Autopilot”, Uber self driving 
  • Anthony Levandowski > Judge Alsup: This is the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen. > This was not small. This was massive in scale.
• [@48:21](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=2901) March Madness of Silicon Valley Fraudsters 
  • Solyndra bankrupt 2011
  • Tether
• [@59:02](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=3542) Levandowski jeopardizes employee 
  • Better Place
  • The Economist Obituary
  • Juicero
  • Flip Video bought by Cisco 2009
• [@1:04:35](https://youtu.be/YWdk9CKML2g?t=3875) Warning signs of fraudulent companies 
  • Transparency, celebrity boards
  • Optane
  • Inconsistency between board and leadership on what the coming milestones are

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: September 13th, 2021

Docker, Inc., an Early Epitaph

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for September 13th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on September 13th included Steve Tuck, Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, Josh Clulow, Ian, Nick Gerace, Aaron Goldman, Drew Vogel, and vint serp. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Topic: Scott Carey’s article How Docker broke in half
  • More by Carey on Docker: 
    • Docker Desktop is no longer free for enterprise users
    • What is Docker? The spark for the container revolution
• Andrej Karpathy’s tweet showing InfoWorld.com spamming ads
• Carey talked to:
  • Solomon Hykes (Docker cofounder with Sebastien Pahl)
  • Ben Golub (Docker CEO 2013-2017)
  • Craig McLuckie (Kubernetes cofounder)
  • Nick Stinemates (early employee and former VP of Business Development)
• [@5:21](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=321) Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 Rashomon ~90mins. Watch a 2min trailer
• Box office bomb “The Hottie and the Nottie” movie. Other stinkers: Gigli, Gotti
• [@9:31](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=571) Jerry Kaplan’s 1996 book Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure
• Steve’s take on commercialization > Bryan: There’s no question that they hit on something very big. > We saw a container as an operational vessel, but we failed to see > a container as a development vessel.
• [@14:36](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=876) dotCloud (PaaS) struggles to find a buyer; ultimately open sources as last resort > All of a sudden a company that nobody had heard of, > was a company that everybody had heard of.
• They took too much money.
• [@17:40](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=1060) Pitfalls in raising money and scaling sales by imitating big companies
  • HBO’s Silicon Valley
    • Clip ~1min with Jan the Man, Keith, and Doug (I’m shadowing Keith) > Everybody should be spending time arm in arm with customers understanding > how is this technology going to solve a problem > which they’ll want to pay to have a solution.
• Tom: Was there actually a business anyways? Or was it just technology?
• What if developers are attracted to those things they know cannot be monetized?
• There was this belief that if a technology is this ubiquitous, it will be readily monetizable.
• [@27:26](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=1646) Docker Swarm and Kubernetes > Hykes: We didn’t work at Google, we didn’t go to Stanford, > we didn’t have a PhD in computer science.
• Stinemates: (The Kubernetes team) had strong opinions about the need for a service level API and Docker technically had its own opinion about a single API from a simplicity standpoint. We couldn’t agree.
  • DockerCon 2015: No mentioning Kubernetes! 
    • Brendan Burns’ talk “The distributed system toolkit: Container patterns for modular distributed system design” was unfortunately made private by Docker sometime in the last two years. The internet archive only has this. Burns wrote a blog post about the topics from his talk.
  • rkt (“Rocket”), CoreOS
• [@36:11](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=2171) Docker coming to market
  • Enterprise teams wanted support
  • Initial support offerings were expensive and limited (no after hours, no weekends) > Bryan: I floated to Solomon in 2014: run container management as a service.
  • Rancher Labs, K3s (lightweight kubernetes)
  • People care about GitHub stars (for better or worse)
• [@48:02](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=2882) Monetizing open source technologies
  • Triton implementing the Docker API
  • The support relationships are the foothold to figure out the product.
• [@54:36](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=3276) Venture capital going into Docker
  • Docker acquires Tutum
• Product market fit
  • Acquisitions
• [@1:04:42](https://youtu.be/l9LTJdT0sZ8?t=3882) Could the outcome have been materially different?
  • Who made money on Docker? Cloud companies? Developers?
  • VMware acquires Heptio
  • Who invented containers? 
    • BSD Jails, Plan9 namespaces?
  • Tyler Tringas’ post about how small teams can create value with little outside investment, as a result of the Peace Dividend of the SaaS Wars.

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: September 6th, 2021

Put the OS back in OSDI

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for September 6th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on September 6th included Dan Cross, Josh Clulow, Tom Lyon, Simeon Miteff, Daniel Maslowski, Matt Campbell and Moritz. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Adam’s tweets on recording Twitter Spaces.
• Tweet on recovering a recording!
• [@4:57](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=297) Timothy Roscoe’s Keynote 
  • Screenshots teasing his slides
  • Conf video
• Complicated relationship with academia and industry 
  • [@8:09](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=489) Adam’s MS graphics experience
  • Bryan’s USENIX 2016 keynote ~1hr: A Wardrobe for the Emperor – Stitching Practical Bias into Systems Software Research 
    • Conferences as the publishing vector for CS research
• [@13:47](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=827) What a modern OS does > … accreted and not designed.
   > They were not designed, they congealed.
• [@17:10](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=1030) Rob Pike’s 2000 “Systems Software Research is Irrelevant” paper
  • The value of incremental improvements
• [@21:47](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=1307) Building on extant working components and interfaces 
  • Opaque, proprietary hardware
  • AMD Platform Security Processor > Artifacts of the OS implementation tend to have outsized impact > on overall system performance
• [@26:27](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=1587) Performance is not the only axis of a system 
  • Security, malleability, convenience, reliability
• [@31:12](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=1872) Specialization 
  • HarmonyOS, Fuchsia
  • Different chips performing different tasks
  • Firmware everywhere
  • Intel Optane
  • Intel 8051
• [@37:02](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=2222) Open hardware and firmware 
  • ARM Cortex-M0 > That’s why we land at incrementalism, we ossify at some boundary. > And it’s very hard to change things on either side without moving in lockstep.
• Tom: The PC architecture was a great thing, but now the OS vendors have abdicated any knowledge of the hardware. Give us UEFI and we don’t care what happens beneath that.
  • Should ARM have UEFI? (or something like it)
• [@45:29](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=2729) Developing hardware is still challenging, but has never been easier than today (especially low-speed) 
  • Tom’s tweet about parallels with homebrew computing in the 70’s
  • Precursor and Xous
• [@50:58](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=3058) Where will new systems development fit in with our existing (working) systems? 
  • Low-speed is an opportunity area
  • RISC-V for peripherals
• [@56:37](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=3397) Backwards compatibility seems to be more important than marginal gains: 
  • Shingled magnetic recording offered <25% density gain at the cost of compatibility
  • Optane: gains didn’t justify the cost
  • Smart NICs only made sense in hyperscale server fleets > Josh: If you’re going to change the programming model, you have to blow the doors off on at least one axis
• [@1:00:45] Moving management plane to a NIC. 
  • AWS Nitro implements this with a series of PCIe offload cards.
• [@1:01:22](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=3682) Abstraction boundaries not designed for the current circumstances 
  • Coordination problems between vendors
  • Vestigial components
  • AMI, AST2500
  • Arcane boot processes and shortcuts available for cloud compute 
    • xhyve
• [@1:08:57](https://youtu.be/PVJfqjJJCkg?t=4137) Removing things is so hard 
  • Things change given enough time
  • Graham Lee’s essay on legacy and software dependencies …and in the end will be the command line
  • If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: August 30th, 2021

A brief history of talking computers

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for August 30, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on August 30th included special guest Matt Campbell, as well as MattSci, TVRaman, Jessamyn West and Dan Cross. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Brian Dear’s The Friendly Orange Glow
  • Brodie Lockard created amazing software on PLATO
  • Control Data Corp Homework
• [@2:47](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=167) Matt’s intro 
  • Deane Blazie created TotalTalk, a speaking terminal. See his 2004 interview.
  • Apple IIe computer and the Echo II speech synthesizer card.
• [@4:15](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=255) The Echo ][ sound sample 
  • Wargames computer: GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN. Listen > SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?
    > Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War?
    > …
    > Is this a game or is it real?
    > WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE?
    > …
    > What’s it doing?
    > It’s learning…
    > …
    > A STRANGE GAME.
    > THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS
    > NOT TO PLAY.
• [@7:46](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=466) 
  • Prose 2000 sample
  • DECtalk audio sample
• [@12:14](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=734) Apple to PC 
  • Keynote Gold, Master Touch, Zoom Text
• [@14:53](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=893) Keynote Gold sample
  • Talking Moose. Watch a sample.
• [@17:17](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=1037) GUI screen readers 
  • outSPOKEN used QuickDraw
  • Window Bridge 1992
• [@21:58](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=1318) Meeting another sight impaired person on a MUD
  • pwWebSpeak
  • Emacspeak
• [@26:44](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=1604) Early programming experiences 
  • Apple IIGS
• [@28:47](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=1727) Emacspeak user base
• [@31:34](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=1894) Things were getting better on the Windows side.. 
  • JAWS, patch parody sample
  • Microsoft Narrator
• [@36:12](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=2172) Linux 
  • Speakup
  • Mixing multiple sound streams, hardware limitations
  • Slackware
  • ZipSpeak by Matthew Campbell
• [@44:53](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=2693) Editors for the visually impaired? 
  • ed text editor
  • Edbrowse
• [@49:36](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=2976) Working on accessibility (a11y) for pay 
  • FreedomBox
  • GNOME EsounD
  • KDE aRts
  • Gnopernicus
  • Orca
• [@57:46](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=3466) 
  • Microsoft Active Accessibility
  • AT-SPI
  • CORBA, D-Bus
• [@1:03:11](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=3791) Handheld devices 
  • Apple VoiceOver
  • Google TalkBack
  • iPhone Screen Recognition article
• [@1:08:09](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=4089) What should software engineers know about accessibility? 
  • Use a mature UI framework!
  • Microsoft UI Automation is the successor to MSAA.
• AccessKit by today’s speaker Matt Campbell!
• [@1:12:34](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=4354) DECtalk samples!
• [@1:15:25](https://youtu.be/b9GVJg0LRX4?t=4525) One of the most important settings a blind person will want to change in their speech synthesizer is how fast it talks. 
  • JAWS parody clip
• Alt text image captions

Topical recent conference presentation: - Emily Shea (2019) Voice Driven Development video

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: August 23rd, 2021

The episode formerly known as ℔

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for August 23rd, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on August 23rd included Neal Gompa, Tom Lyon, Laura Abbott, Jeremy Tanner, Matt Campbell, Simeon Miteff and others. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Last week’s recording on “Showstopper” with author G. Pascal Zachary, and Jessamyn West.
• Ashton-Tate history (there never was any Ashton, and dBASE II was the first version) 
  • dBASE IV was “slow, buggy” and didn’t get fixed in a timely manner
  • Last week, Pascal mentioned that CEO Ed Esber “in a fit of insanity admitted to me (a journalist) he didn’t know how to use his company’s own product!”
  • Friday! personal information manager, and Sidekick from Borland (like Google calendar for DOS)
• [@3:01](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=181) Phrasing: operating program (vs operating system) 
  • Steve Jobs 1992 MIT Sloan talk ~72mins on consultants, hiring people and leaving Apple (see mit.edu summary) > Jobs: NeXTSTEP is not an operating system, it’s an operating environment
  • July 5th recording discussing NeXT. Randall Stross book: Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing (1993) > Mac OSX focused on user capabilities of the desktop environment, but they considered it one and the same with the operating system
• [@7:42](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=462) Windows NT had “multiple personalities” > Adam: I was instantly transported to the 90’s. > Bryan: I could hear Smashing Pumpkins playing on the radio. 
  • Sun’s Spring OS was the ne plus ultra of this approach
  • Mach microkernel, GNU Hurd, Apple M1,
  • Windows Subsystem for Linux WSL > Adam: Docker takes static linking to the extreme and just ships everything
• [@12:40](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=760) Microkernels > Simeon: (Oxide) is working on a microkernel for Hubis, tell us about that 
  • Minix, and the Tanenbaum-Torvalds 1992 microkernel vs monolithic debate
  • QNX Unix-like real-time OS 
    • See ACM ByteCast interview with Rashmi Mohan, Bryan tells the story ~3mins of coming to QNX after reading about it in the “Operating Systems Roundup” of Byte Magazine 1993 (see also Bryan’s blog post and remembering Dan Hildebrand)
    • L4 microkernel
    • The QNX 1.44M demo disk
      • The GUI was called Photon. > Bryan: why would we not run this (QNX) absolutely everywhere?
  • Oberon OS. Photon microGUI
• [@15:49](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=949) Laura on writing a microcontroller operating system 
  • Cliff Biffle’s website
  • Microkernels, root of trust, embedded systems
  • There is very little (or no) dynamic memory allocation in Hubris.
  • Tock multitasking embedded OS, and Bryan’s “Tockilator: Deducing Tock execution flows from Ibex Verilator traces” video ~12mins
  • In Tock, dynamic program loading is central. Hubris functions as a security-minded service processor. The programs it will use are all known in advance; so dynamic loading (and the accompanying security concerns) can be left out.
  • Fit-to-purpose OSs
• [@24:19](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=1459) ROPI/RWPI (aka “Ropy Rippy”) and the growing pains of RISC-V 
  • GitHub issue ROPI/RWPI Specification (Embedded PIC)
  • OpenTitan, ARM Cortex-M > When we set out to write Hubris, we spent a lot of time reading > and learning what’s out there.
  • QNX vs monolithic systems. QNX was robust against module failure, so bugs in modules were tolerable. At Sun, faults in a module were system faults, so bugs were unacceptable.
  • Memory protection. Stack growing into (and corrupting) data segment, hard to debug.
  • Stack corruption, a hit and run.
• [@32:39](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=1959) Humor: Oxide rustfmt bot is named Ozymandias 
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” poem > LOOK UPON MY REFORMATTING YE MIGHTY AND DESPAIR!
  • stale bot, open source maintainers, communicating bugs and issues
• [@39:54](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=2394) Fun QNX bug story 
  • QNX wrote their own POSIX utilities, they wrote their own AWK
  • QNX developers, incl. Peter van der Veen
• [@43:00](https://youtu.be/-ZRv6EHaQYM?t=2580) How do you say… 
  • vi, ed > Tom: Off with their eds!
  • sed, ps, kubectl, /etc/passwd, QNX (...

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: August 16th, 2021

The Showstopper Show

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for August 16th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on August 16th included special guests G. Pascal Zachary (see gpascalzachary.com), and Jessamyn West (see jessamyn.medium.com), as well as Dan Cross, Tom Lyon, Josh Clulow, and others. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• G. Pascal Zachary’s “Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft” book
• Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine” book
• [@0:46](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=46) “The endless debate of NT vs Unix.” 
  • Bryan: My whole career was kind of defined by going where Windows wasn’t. I don’t know what I was expecting, but what I found was a real time capsule from software development in the 90’s.
• [@2:46](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=166) Jessamyn: There was some familial impact (from developing DG Eclipse) that wasn’t mentioned in the book. 
  • “O, Engineers!” retrospective from wired
• [@6:30](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=390) What was Kidder’s process? “He lived in my house!”
• [@8:32](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=512) Zachary interviewed family members extensively. > People couldn’t leave, they were staying at the office all the time.
• [@14:23](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=863) I do feel this is a time capsule. A time before two mega-trends hit: the Internet and open source.
• [@17:33](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1053) Microsoft was kind of a joke software company in the early 90’s. > Dave Cutler was a force of nature.
• [@19:59](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1199) No one understood why someone was good at coding. It was a mystery to everyone, why there was such a wide stratification of coders. > There were projects that never saw the light of day. 
  • Ashton-Tate, dBase > There was a sense from Cutler and Perazzoli, that leadership of the team, > that these guys at Microsoft really didn’t get how serious the process > of building this battleship was.
  • I think the level of anguish did surprise me.
• [@23:59](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1439)
   In “Soul of the New Machine,” the machine was the star, and people served it. East Coast vs West Coast attitudes. > On the West Coast, the personal computer were supposed to help you > actualize your counter-cultural values. 
  • Ken Olsen of DEC > Computing is equivalent with IBM. There was no software industry > so long as IBM gave all the software away for free.
• [@26:09](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1569) Crashes. > Wozniak dreamed of owning > his own PDP > computer, which cost as much as a house. So he was aware of the robustness > of the minicomputer, and by contrast, the puny power of a personal computer. 
  • Thirtysomething > Dave Cutler was not cuddly. He was menacing, he could lose his temper. > And I tried not to get to close to him physically for that reason. > There were two looming father figures in Cutler and Gates. > And I think it created a lot of anxiety.
• [@29:52](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1792) The stakes for NT at Microsoft were high. 
  • Fred Brooks’ “The Mythical Man-Month” book > It was a watershed moment in the history of computing. > It was more like the last battleship, rather than the next frontier.
  • Bryan: I didn’t realize this, that Gates was arguing against memory protection with Cutler. From our perspective, shipping an operating system without memory protection, in an era when microprocessors supported it, is malpractice.
• [@33:14](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=1994) Cutler’s vendetta against Unix. > Conflict was at the heart of innovation at Microsoft at that time. 
  • Mitch Kapor of Lotus. > These early personal computer innovators were dismissed and sometimes > humiliated by mainstream big iron people of the 60’s and 70’s.
  • Bill Gates’ “The Road Ahead” book doesn’t mention the internet.
  • Zachary’s “Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century” book > Computers on the West Coast were seen as extensions of your creativity, > and a tool for liberation. And for a long time that dominated the horizons.
• In 2005 Gates and Ballmer don’t want to do cloud computing. “Who’s gonna want to put their stuff in the cloud?” We’ve found that computing is a collective experience.
• [@38:28](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=2308) Email and personal messaging 
  • Sun Ray thin client computer
  • Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson’s “The UNIX time-sharing system” paper > Unix was an experiment in collaboration.
  • RSX-11 for the PDP-11. And VMS for the VAX. > The attitude of looking down on Unix (as undesigned, academic) is > carried forward by Microsofties today.
  • Tom: You can forgive Cutler’s misgivings, because Unix pretty much stole the thunder out of VMS.
• [@42:24](https://youtu.be/hlQuF75L4TE?t=2544) Interviews for the book. Family members perspective on workplace behavior. 
  • Betty Shanahan, Society of Women Engineers. Brief Q&A
  • EAGLE (Eclipse Appreciation and Gratitude for Lonely Evenings) award > Betty’s husband got an award for having to do his own laundry…
  • Jessamyn’s “Women in Early Tech” blog entry about Shanahan