The State of the Internet Operating System

macslocum writes "Tim O'Reilly: 'I've been talking for years about "the internet operating system," but I realized I've never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post. Here you will see the underlying beliefs about the future that are guiding my publishing program as well as the rationale behind conferences I organize.'"

Comments

Dumb terminals and smart people don't mix

[elrous0]

This whole "Internet OS" thing reminds me of the periodic resurgences of the dumb terminal/thin client idea that goes back to the mainframe days. It seems like every ten years or so, everyone is talking about thin clients in every office, with the OS and apps running on some offsite server somewhere (now with the added twist of multiple servers over the internet). Ostensibly this is seen as a good way to save IT money and overhead. But in every actual deployment I've seen, it only causes hassles, additional expense, and headaches.

Back in the 90's we tried this at my old university. We networked all our computers and put all our apps on a central server. Even though this was all done on a local network (much more reliable in those days than the internet), it was still a complete disaster. Every time there was a glitch in the network; every student, professor, and staff member at the university lost the ability to do anything on their computer--they couldn't so much as type a Word document. Now, with little network downtime, you would think this wouldn't be so much of a problem--but when you're talking about thousands of people who live and die by the written word, and who are often working on class deadlines, you can imagine that even 30 minutes of downtime was a nightmare. I was skeptical of this system from the get-go, but got overruled by some "visionaries" who had bought into the whole thin client argument with a religious fervor. Of course, long story short, we ended up scrapping the system after a year and going back to the old system (with a significant cost to the state and university for our folly).

Re:Dumb terminals and smart people don't mix

[david.given]

I weep for OpenMOSIX. I was hoping that the project would continue and ere long we'd be motivated to buy all one architecture in our house simply because all the machines would form a cluster almost without our involvement and just accelerate each others' tasks. A terminal cluster where the terminals also make the entire system faster is kind of an ideal dream.

What happened to OpenMOSIX, anyway? I used it very successfully to turn groups of workstations into build servers; they all ran OpenMOSIX, and then make -j8 on any of the workstations would farm out the build to all the workstations. And it all Just Worked, and there was bugger all maintenance involved, etc. I was really looking forward to it getting mainlined into the kernel and then it just all kind of vanished.

There's no indication of what happened on the mailing list --- it just stops. There's a new project called LinuxPMI that claims to be a continuation but there's no mailing list traffic...