
The myth of the fall - clarkm
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5277
======
bbanyc
_The MIT AI Lab itself never found its way to that new world. There’s a reason
the Emacs text editor is the only software artifact of that culture that
survives to us, and it had to be rewritten from the ground up on the way._

It didn't come from MIT, but TeX is certainly an artifact of the same academic
hacker culture. Knuth originally wrote it at SAIL to run on the local OS,
WAITS. It was rewritten in Pascal, not C, to be portable to the wide range of
operating systems out there in 1980.

(I understand that GNU info is also a reimplementation of MIT AI Lab software,
which explains a lot.)

~~~
pekk
The culture of the MIT AI Lab which spawned Emacs is more specific than the
"academic hacker culture" including Knuth.

~~~
bbanyc
Agreed, but SAIL was, if not strictly the same culture as the AI Lab, at least
significantly connected to it.

------
zurn
> The Unix guys showed us the way out, by (a) inventing the first non-
> assembler language really suitable for systems programming, and (b) proving
> it by writing an operating system in it.

Not the first, see eg. Burroughs mainframes, early 60's.

JOVIAL was another language, used for systems programming on the militay side,
predating C and proven.

Pascal was contemporary with C and UCSD p-System was released just 2 years
later than Unix. It was also more portable and retargetable than Unix.

~~~
Hoff
Another early system programming language: CMU Bliss. Bliss was used to
develop operating systems within Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC),
including VMS / OpenVMS.

If anyone here is interested in experimenting with a Bliss compiler, there's
one installed on the gein.vistech.net VMS server, and there are free accounts
available there. Visit
[http://deathrow.vistech.net](http://deathrow.vistech.net) for account
registration details.

FWIW, the UCSD P-System and p-code and the Pascal compiler was easily
portable, but the tools were also very buggy (at least) on the Terak boxes,
and — even for the era — very slow. Folks were always working around some bug
or another, or some slowness.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It's not just bugs and slowness. At least in those days, Pascal had the size
of an array as part of the type of the array. This meant that you could not
have a variable-sized array, because you could not give it a type.

True story: I took over a numerical simulation on a 2D grid that ran slowly,
because it implemented the 2D grid as a linked list. If you wanted to refer to
the node directly below the current one, and the grid was 60x60, you had to
follow 60 links to do it! I looked down on the guy who wrote it as being
somehow hung up on linked lists, like it was his favorite data structure from
school or something. Only later did I find out that he had no choice - he
couldn't allocate a variable-sized array. So we re-wrote it to allocate the
biggest array we had memory to hold, and to only use part of it.

But if we were trying to write a portable operating system, or something of
that sort, our kludge would not have worked. Allocating the biggest possible
size needed is _not_ good behavior for an OS...

------
e12e
> This is why the earliest social experiments in what we would now call “open
> source” – at SHARE and DECUS – were restricted to individual vendors’
> product lines and (often) to individual machine types.

Yes, because BASIC and Creative Computing magazine never happened.

Conflating the idea of sharing code, with the idea of sharing system level
code doesn't really help this essay IMNHO.

As for the "creation myth" \-- I guess that refers to stuff like:
[http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html](http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html)

I'm not sure how this is supposed to be a "myth". As far as I can tell we went
from relatively open systems (if not free) to much more closed systems. And
now, after the rise of various standard platforms (x86, sparc, arm) we're in a
strange (and a little scary) in-between place where we have oodles of great
hardware, half of which we have no real idea how works, except for binary
driver blobs.

I guess I just don't understand the motivation for tying together the fact
that we've come a long way in terms of system and language design, and that
because of that we've been able to get some pretty solid open systems -- and
that closed systems aren't (and never was) a bad thing, because, you know *bsd
and linux and stuff?

And there's of course stuff like:
[http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....](http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pdf)

While later than C, in some ways arguably more open than unix (as it was
actually published and distributed).

~~~
chalst
Wrt. early social experiments: there clearly was a well-developed code-sharing
community by the mid 1960s dealing with scientific computing in Fortran, with
textbooks offering incremental refinements of programs to solve problems of
shared interest, and there was some portability to such code, within
constraints. But I think esr is talking about the emergence of a much more
fluent kind of sharing, that needed much deeper portability and automated
configuration, and much more direct peer-to-peer sharing of code, of the sort
that the emerging connected networks that were to become the internet offered.
What you are talking about resembles the early Fortran sharing more than it
resembles the Unix-centric sharing.

The motivation for the tying you talk of is that it is this kind of code
sharing that has really liberated hackers from the grip of proprietary
computing. The Fortran and Basic -style of sharing still left hackers with
considerable lock-in to the computing environment they were currently using.

~~~
e12e
Well, I can sort of read that _into_ the article too, but it doesn't actually
make that argument coherently nor explicitly...

------
filmgirlcw
No matter how valid some of these arguments may or may not be, this is like
the nth time ESR has had to make this sort of point, which is basically to
attempt to lessen the cultural impact of RMS and the other MIT AI guys.

Like, we get it dude. 30+ years later you're still upset that you didn't get
into MIT and weren't part of the MIT/CMU/SAIL crowd. Steven Levy didn't
mention you in _Hackers_ and called RMS "the last true hacker" \-- we get it,
you're still butthurt. But seriously dude, move the fuck on...

~~~
anatoly
I may dislike esr as much as the next fellow, but your response is degrading
noise. It wasn't esr who upvoted the link here to the point of your
visibility, it was people who found it interesting. If you're annoyed by that,
flag, filter, stop reading the site, whatever, but this sort of armchair
psychoanalyzing says more about you than esr.

------
leandrod
As usual, ESR gives us quite a few factual errors and misrepresentations in
order to try to elevate himself at RMS’s expense.

------
gaius
_The reason is brutally simple: software wasn’t portable!_

Uhh, CP/M? More gibberish from ESR.

------
arca_vorago
The myth of the fall is that we imagine we were at a higher place than we are
now according to this, but I would say it's not that black and white. In
between proprietary products, the foss culture soared, and during years of
proprietary product releases, it was relegated to the hacker and academic
realms (as opposed to consumer).

Let's not forget that the BSD (Net1) debacle didn't even start till about 89
and Linux didn't show up till, what, 91? There is a huge time gap between the
origins of the open source culture and the practical availability for
tinkerers.

Also, please, please don't forget the influence of Minix in this (also not
till 87). sidenote: If you weren't aware, Minix 3 is now BSD licensed, and I
find it as a ray of hope for the future (10k lines of kernel code vs what,
10mil in linux now? Let's admit it, linux is getting out of control of the
open source review principle... but I digress.)

The real gem of this article is the end:

"We didn’t get here because we failed in our duty to protect a prelapsarian
software commons, but because we succeeded in creating one."

What that really means is that although open source got us to where we are
today, we are still in a very precarious position. "Prelapsarian" is right. We
are in a time where the potential for a lapse back to proprietary is far too
strong at the moment, and honestly while I understand the arguments between
BSD and GPL, I think history has shown that BSD is far too easily abused
(Apple/Windows netstacks, etc), and RMS will in the future history books
either be considered a visionary ahead of his time or wiped from the pages of
history due to the totalitarianism in effect.

Software is a social issue, there is no way around that fact, and we ignore it
at our peril.

(one more sidenote: I think one of the main threats of proprietary these days
is, that as open source/foss takes over, it becomes the backend blob that
everyone ignores and forgets about. See: GSM stack, etc. We need to keep FOSS
close to the hardware)

~~~
angersock
The main threat to open-sores software right now is the 'net, and customer
expectations. We have all cultivated business models that are predicated on
sharecropping of walled gardens, and trained users to solely desire that sort
of relationship and accompanying functionality.

------
prawn
Don't miss the first three comments at the end:

Jay Maynard (yeah, that Tron costume guy+) - "Not only did RMS have to co-opt
Unix technology, he bathed about it, as well." ""bathed"??!?!! Damned auto-
correct. That was supposed to be "bitched"."

Patrick Maupin: "Yeah, we all knew RMS didn't do _that_..."

(RMS is not well known for exceptional personal hygiene.)

\+
[https://www.google.com.au/search?q=Jay+Maynard&safe=off&espv...](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=Jay+Maynard&safe=off&espv=210&es_sm=91&source=lnms&tbm=isch)

~~~
jessaustin
Come on downvoters, you saw "safe=off" in the link, didn't you?

