Slashdot Mirror
The Future of the Net
Fuzzball963 writes "Kevin Kelly has an interesting article over at Wired on the development and future of the web. In it, he argues that in ten years the desktop OS will become obsolete in favor of a Web based one, and that content on the web will be automatically customized according to the device being used to access it (PDA, smartphone,etc)." From the article: "Today the nascent Machine routes packets around disturbances in its lines; by 2015 it will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again. The patterns of the Machine's internal workings will be so complex they won't be repeatable; you won't always get the same answer to a given question. It will take intuition to maximize what the global network has to offer. The most obvious development birthed by this platform will be the absorption of routine. The Machine will take on anything we do more than twice. It will be the Anticipation Machine."
The first reset that I know of would be the jump from OS-less computers (like C64 or Apple 2 or even DOS in a way) to OS based ones.
Those computers had OS's. You have to go back much further in time to find ones that didn't. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system .
The Apple II wasn't 'OS-less' by any stretch of the imagination. It used either Apple DOS or Apple ProDOS as its OS, depending upon which machine and applications you were talking about. I don't know much about the architecture of the C64, but I'll bet it was hardly 'OS-less'.
And there were machines prior to Apple and Commodore that used CP/M as their OS.
And there was never any sudden 'jump' from CLI to GUI. The first machine with a GUI was the Xerox Alto. There were several other GUI implementations between the introduction of the Alto in 1973 (2 years before Apple was even a glint in Steve Jobs' eye) and 1984, when Apple introduced the first widely-popular GUI-based computer, the Macintosh. It wouldn't be until the early 90s that Windows would begin displacing DOS. In fact, in 1995 at the time of the introduction of Windows 95, the OS largest installed-base OS in the world was still MS-DOS.
I think you're oversimplifying things greatly.
My blog
The Apple II wasn't 'OS-less' by any stretch of the imagination. It used either Apple DOS or Apple ProDOS as its OS, depending upon which machine and applications you were talking about. I don't know much about the architecture of the C64, but I'll bet it was hardly 'OS-less'.
You can consider the Apple II to be OS-less. When your code was running, absolutely nothing interfered with it. No other processes were running. You could write to any memory address you wanted. You put graphics up on the screen by writing directly to the memory associated with it. What the Apple II did have was a set of utility routines, either in ROM or loaded from the DOS boot disk. But you could live just fine without those routines if you chose to do so.
The Atari 800, to give another example, had a little mini-OS that was essentially there to provide services for BASIC and other language environments: simple screen I/O, simple copying of values from RAM to hardware registers during the vertical blank (to allow POKE-ing in BASIC without mid-frame flicker). Things like that. But you could just as easily take over the whole machine and do whatever you wanted, and that was common, because the OS services did nothing useful for you most of the time.