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Operating Systems Are Irrelevant
zincks writes "David Gelernter (Yale Professor of Computer Science, and Unabomber target) has a
story in the NY Times which states, (1) Operating systems are relics of the past, (2) We should be able to access data anytime/anywhere, by (3) seeing a stream of 3D documents(?), so (4) he's written such
software, and (5) that's all you should care about so it doesn't matter that it runs under windows.
This is a fantastic (definition: based on fantasy : not real (?)) vision of the future by a premier technologist."
I remember when i first heard about this guy on Big Thinkers. He had some far fetched ideas about completely tossing the desktop out of the window.. I like some of his concepts with desktop management, but at the time of the broadcast of the show, he mentioned tossing the concept of normal *files* and folders too. It seems that might have changed a bit, as it was too radical.
- tristan
Forget the Files and the Folders: Let Your Screen Reflect Life
By DAVID GELERNTER
THE end of the Microsoft trial is great news whatever you think of the defendant - because the trial was all about the past, and we in the technology world have no more time to waste on that topic.
The trial focused on Microsoft's Windows operating system - on the power Microsoft gets from Windows' huge worldwide penetration; on the burdens that other software companies bear because of their limited access to the Windows software; on accusations that Microsoft was suppressing innovation. The courts have officially labeled the gigantic software company a monopoly, and Microsoft will be subject to careful scrutiny for abusive activity.
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Meanwhile, operating systems are lapsing into senile irrelevance. An operating system connects the user (and the user's software) to the ensemble of machines we call a computer. But nowadays users no longer want to be connected to computers. They want to be connected to information, a claim that sounds vague but is clear and specific.
Every piece of digital information you own or share will appear (in the near future) in one universal structure. (Just ask Bill Gates: as he said cogently last July, "Why are my document files stored one way, my contacts another way and my e-mail and instant-messaging buddy list still another, and why aren't they related to my calendar or to one another, and easy to search en masse?") A universal structure demands universal access: you'll be able to tune in this structure from any Net-connected computer anywhere.
I have time for only one screen in my life. That screen had better give me access to everything, everywhere.
What is this universal information structure? A narrative stream, which says, "Let me tell you a story. " The system shows you a 3-D stream of electronic documents flowing through time. The future (where you store your calendar, reminders, plans) flows into the present (where you keep material you're working on right now) and on into the past (where every e-mail message and draft, digital photo, application, virtual Rolodex card, video and audio clip and Web bookmark is stored, in addition to all those calendar notes and reminders that used to be part of the future and have since flowed into the past to be archived forever).
And so the organization of your digital information reflects the shape of your life, not the shape of a 1940's Steelcase file cabinet. Storage space and computing power are dirt cheap; our task isn't to "use them efficiently," it's to "squander them creatively." Instead of searching through your stream for some document, you focus it (as if you were focusing an information beam - which is like a flashlight beam cutting through the digital fog, except that the beam is made of information instead of light). You wind up with a selection of documents, a "substream" that tells some particular story. Your narrative stream as a whole consists of all the interwoven stories that make up your life - your own personal ones as well as the stories of all the groups and communities you belong to.
This kind of information management is simpler, more powerful and more natural than the Steelcase-inspired software we've got today - the files, the folders, the desktops and all those other high-tech office accessories straight out of 1946.
How do I know it will work? Because our company has built it, and it does. (A preliminary desktop version of narrative information management can be downloaded free at our Web site, www.scopeware.com.) Microsoft has similar goals for its Longhorn system, but Longhorn won't be available for two years. We needed one-screen narrative information management yesterday. Our software is up and running today.
Windows is no tool for the future and doesn't claim to be. Technology's future can't possibly be based on treating computers as if they were hyped-up desks and file cabinets - passive pieces of ugly furniture. Computers are active machines, and information-management software had better treat them that way. But Windows can play a central role in giving the future a leg up. It can supply a stable, ubiquitous platform for the future to stand on.
We built our system on Microsoft Windows because Windows is a reliable, solid, reasonably priced, nearly universal platform - and for the software future, "universal" is nonnegotiable. We need to run the system on as many computers as possible and manage the maximum range of electronic documents.
Of course, another operating system, Linux, is also clamoring for attention. Linux and Windows are both children of the 70's: Linux grew out of Unix, invented by AT Windows is based on the revolutionary work of Xerox research. In technology years, these loyal and devoted operating systems are each approximately 4,820 years old. (Technology years are like dog years, only shorter.)
Each is nonetheless still solid enough to be a good, steady platform for the next step in software. But Windows is the marketplace victor and has now won a decisive legal imprimatur. There is no technical reason for us to move to Linux; why should we switch? Why should our customers?
Some argue for Linux on economic and cultural grounds: Microsoft, people say, has driven up prices and suppressed innovation. But this is a ticklish argument at best: after all, over the decade of Microsoft's hegemony, computing power has grown cheaper and cheaper. Innovation has thrived. Our software is innovative; it has not been suppressed. On the contrary, more and more people get interested.
Operating systems are the moldy basements of computing. We used to live down there, but are now moving upstairs to healthier quarters. We rely on the courts and antitrust laws to keep Microsoft from abusing its enormous power. We need Microsoft itself to be the universal stepladder that lets us climb out of our hole and smell the roses.
Professor of Computer Science
B.A., Yale University, 1976Ph.D., The State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1982
Joined Yale Faculty 1982
David Gelernter's research interests include information management, parallel programming, software ensembles and artificial intelligence. The coordination language called "Linda" that he developed with Nicholas Carriero (also of Yale) sees fairly widespread use world-wide for parallel programming.
Gelernter's current interests include adaptive parallelism, programming environments for parallelism, realtime data fusion, expert databases and information-management systems (the Lifestreams system in particular). He is co-author of two textbooks (on programming languages and on parallel programming methods), author of Mirror Worlds (Oxford: 1991), the Muse in the Machine (Free Press: 1994 -- about how thinking works), and a forthcoming book in the "Masterclasses" series about aesthetics and computing. He has published cultural-implications-of-computing-type pieces in many newspapers and magazines, is contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, the National Review and is art critic at the Weekly Standard.
Representative Publications
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
Sure we should agree that there are much better ways to present higher level abstractions such as presentation and storage of informatio, however in the end it must sit on an OS.
As to which OS, perhaps users shoudn't care if each system was able to provide a similar set of services, however in relity operating systms tend to specialise somewhat. For example the Win speciality is the BSOD!!!!
No seriously, there are two questions to be asked here:
Whith specialised system like the engine management system in a car, I as a user don't give a damn. The only interface is presented by the application (throttle, etc). With a general purpose system like a PC, the user is exposed to the system in a number of ways, indeed Linux (and other Unixes) are slightly better in this respect because at least the GUI and the desktop are not integrated into the OS.
Actually, quite a bit of headway has been made in replacing the folder model with a database model. Products such as DOCsOpen (company called Hummingbird) and iManage, as well as Tahoe (MS) and the BeOS have made great pushes in either popping down the files anywhere, or at least giving the end user a layer of abstraction that uses a DB to access the data/files, rather than the "folder within a folder" thing.
Also, thinkers like Alan Kay have been pushing for the death of the "Desktop" metaphor for well over a decade. It had its purpose in the start, but now it's just tired and irrelevant.
Gelertner wrote all about this in his book, Machine Beauty, from 1999. This is OLD news, some poor reporter just got sucked in. And from reading his book, and playing with the demos he has, I would not be able to stand using his software... Seems like a good idea, but somehow, the implementation feels just lousy.
-- John
Having worked with Big Iron before, I can safely say that you're wrong about there not being an OS in them.
The OS is much closer to what one -should- be, though, and is quite unobtrusive.
As for the cell phones and PDA's (the PDA's in particular) -do- have an OS.
I mean, christ. the Palm and Visor run the -PalmOS- for crying out loud!! All those cellphones that have the games and crap on them now? there's an OS there, too.
Just because it's unobtrusive, and does what a good OS should, doesn't mean that it's not there.
I've had a chance to talk to some of these guys last year, and I've used the system a bit. We also talked about some of this in a UI design class I took.
Scopeware (the system he built) is actually pretty interesting. The premise (or part of it) is that people aren't good at filing things in a hierarchical filesystem. Instead, the system simply keeps everything in one long hierarchical sequence, and tries to provide more intuitive ways of searching it.
Specifically, it tries to emulate piles of papers on a desk. New stuff is at the top, but you can kinda scan the edges of a lot of the documents at once. If you need to find something specific, youo can "flip through" the pile until you find it. I believe that you can define criteria such that different piles are built automatically from the same set of documents. In a sense, this is similar to Evolution's VFolders - you don't move emails from your inbox to another folder, but set up virtual folders based on predefined searches.
In this sense, the OS and filesystem are irrelevant, just like the OS is irrelevant to (pure) Java programs, and just like the filesystem is irrelevant in most email programs (Evolution, Kmail, Outlook). Of course, the data is stored in files within directories on a disk managed by an OS, but given that there is a completely different method of accessing that data, who cares?
In a sense, this is actually similar to Unix's "everything is a file philosophy", except that here it would be expressed as "everything that's important is a document.
Scopeware itself is a server that stores all documents, emails, etc. for a group of people. It then manages access to them, and sets up these "piles" for everyone who runs a scopeware client.
Solution to blink tags: wrap them in another blink tag, with a javascript delay loop, so they cancel each other out
I never did write that example, but I looked into Lifestreams enough to think that it is a very valid metaphor for accessing information.
Lifestreams orders information by date - imagine that you remember writing a memo just before Easter vacation this year. Then, you would scan documents created around that time period, and hopefully find it in a few seconds.
Obviously, in this example, you could just sort old email, word processing documents, etc. by date using Konquerer, Mac Finder, Windows Explorer, whatever, but Lifestreams understands many file formats and unifies this entire process.
-Mark
These great ideas are hindered by one thing. Reality. It would be great if cars didn'pollute, roads and bridges didn't deteriorate, and everything we wanted could just appear in front of us.
This article is almost insulting to all the programmers and developers who have been trying to do just this thing for decades. Many of the issues he'd like resolved are actually being worked on by real people right now as we speak.
I've got good ideas too on lots of things, but I always thought I'd have to actually demonstrate how they'd be done to be considered an authority.
I don't blame Microsoft for the failure of Newton.
I do blame them for the failure of Go! (If that was their name) Back at the time, I was in the OS/2 crowd, and the failure of Go! was a well-talked-about 'example' of the Microsoft way of competing. Basically, they were working to bring a pen-based product to market. Microsoft preemptively announced, "Pen for Windows" and Go! lost their funding as a result. Maybe they would have failed inthe market, but they never got the chance.
As for "Microsoft is not the technological super-being..." Back in the 90's when Venture Capital was flowing, the key question for software startups was, "What is your Microsoft strategy?" There were companies started with the goal of eventually being bought out by Microsoft. (This information was from business/trade/news magazines at the time.) So maybe they're not the super-being, but they do have paranormal market powers that may not always be beneficial.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Yup, the company was GO, and the book about it is:
Startup
by Jerry Kaplan
Kaplan had the idea for pen computing and founded GO to pursue the dream. The book is based on his personal diary and gives a pretty good view of starting a company, seeking capital, expansion, and ultimately failing. (And this was a good idea, not a dot.com) You get to see some nasty moves by a number of the other players, including Microsoft, Apple, and (I believe) Intel, among others.
I highly recommend the book!
Actually, MS did put Go directly out of business. The original poster is (slightly) incorrect though. MS did not just announce one vaporware product, I believe they announced as many as three different, codeveloping (!) vaporware products well in advance of any scheduled debut (i.e., MS reacted and crushed the nascent market with nothing except marketing). None of the three product announcements ever materialized. How's that for FUD?
Go already had shipping product but corporate interest and, more importantly, sales waned rapidly *after* the MS announcements. Go died just as it was releasing its strongest platform yet.
This was MS at its peak "best" during its heyday. With the new "laissez faire" ruling, MS is probably now going to have a revival.
Go had some very interesting technology (OS, multilingual handwriting recognition, hardware) which was eventually lost in a corporate buyout by AT&T (where it then was sold to some Asian (Korean?) firm where it stagnated and died as far as I know).
Go is probably one of the most prominent examples of MS FUD destroying innovation (though there are plenty others).
First, you are making a common error. You are making the assumption that the lack of integrated device drivers is a problem with linux as opposed to a problem with vendor support.
You are also making the common error that Windows always works and supports everything automatically. Why just the other day I plugged my Wife's Win2K box into my 2 year old Brother 1270N printer via USB and Windows detected new hardware. Then it told me it couldn't find a driver, but I could search the CDROM and Windows update. Oops, STILL couldn't find a driver so I ended up having to go to the brother web site, manually download and install the driver.
In contrast, my Debian box just worked. All the drivers were there. Most hardware autodects just fine thankyouverymuch.
It's actually quite rare that I can get a driver for ANYTHING directly from MS. I usually have to go to the vendors web site or dig up an old CDROM and go the manual install route. Lack of Linux support is almost UNIVERALLY because the vendor does not release a linux driver and refuses to release the tech info so that someone else can write a driver. This has NOTHING to do with Linux and ALL to do with the vendors being a bunch of fucking idiots. Most hardware autodects just fine thankyouverymuch. There is nothing wrong with the modular driver model in Linux except for the current historical limits on major/minor device numbering that is being addressed. I can load, unload, and replace device driver modules on the fly without rebooting for most hardware (there are some exceptions like the disk driver you are currently using and such, but this is to be expected.) In contrast, Windows STILL needs to be rebooted several times if you are replacing a driver for example. When things go right in Windows, people are happy and things are easy. When things go wrong, all hell breaks lose. Since only MS really knows what's going on inside, the frequent "fix" is to re-install everything from scratch.
Back to the article, this guy is naive. While Windows is fairly universal in the desktop area, that's the ONLY place that it's mostly universal. In the PDA space, server space, set-top space, embedded space, etc. it's an equal player, a minor player, or a non-player. In non-US markets, Windows is taking a MAJOR hit and its dominance is far from universal.
OK, enough on the OS ranting.
The problem with higher levels of abstration is that it starts to fail when the amount of data increases. Sure it's easy to find your resume on a view of a few documents, but when you have thousands of documents this model starts to fail. You need to start organizing stuff in a logical manor. You need to organize stuff the way YOU think, not the way some programmer at MS or somewhere else thinks.
It's interesting looking at how people organize files on their computers. From a very simplistic and general view, I have noticed that Low-level employees tend to keep all their documents in one folder and high level employees (managers, executives) tend to have things orgnized several levels deep. Again, a very general observation.
Looking at your PDA example, you can organize your contacts in categories. How many people do that? It depends on how many contacts you have. In a small company I may load the phonelist in to one "company" category. In a larger company, I may load the phone list into departmental categories. How would his 3D view handle this? Would it always organize stuff in a very granular manor or would it tend to lump things all together? Who decides? Do I have to do this manually? If so, how is this better than the file / folder mentality?