
The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer [video] - tosh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc&list=PLoROMvodv4rMWw6rRoeSpkiseTHzWj6vu
======
zeckalpha
The title is a reference to Tracy Kidder’s book:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine)

~~~
teh_klev
It's a bit of a shame Cantrill jumps from the PDP11/70 to the Sun blob without
even a brief mention of DG's finest (and the namesake company of the title of
the presentation) such as the Nova and Eclipse ranges of their day. We should
all feel cheated by this :) But anyway...

I was once-upon-a-time a Data General field engineer back in the 80's and
bumped into The Soul of a New Machine around '87\. It's a great read and a
nice insight into DG as a company who were still considered a wee bit of a
rogue outlier compared to DEC and IBM.

I'm a member of a closed group of ex DG employees on Facebook (was still
permitted membership due to being in the broker game back then despite not
being an employee), they're a really nice bunch of folks, though growing older
by the day.

I had the pleasure and luck to work on older Novas (like the 800, 1200 and
3's) and the Nova 4 and the Eclipse 16-bit range such as the S/130's and all
their associated peripherals (Phoenix and Gemini hard disks, Zebra disk drives
the size of two washing machines etc). Fun fact - you could upgrade the Nova 4
to an S/140 by "obtaining" the correct microcode PROM's and performing some
other minor patching; we did this, it wasn't always considered legal, but
every other broker out there also was up to this game. DG didn't seem to mind
because by then their mainline product by then were the MV's. DG was a very
leaky company with regards to getting hold of "stuff", I don't recall anyone
being sued for unlicensed and pirated copies of RDOS or AOS etc. A thing that
was an expensive item from DG but almost like a consumable were these things
called paddle boards. They're basically passive PCB's that allow interfacing
between the inside of the machine to the outside world. We never bought these
from DG, they always came from "some guy" and a box of 20 cost less than a
bonafide DG part. DG knew this but never complained.

The diagnostic tools were tremendous (DTOS and ADES) which coupled with a
portable fiche reader allowed you to diagnose and fix most problems on site.
These were good times and I learned a huge amount about problem solving as a
young broth-of-a-boy engineer. I still have a copy of "How to Microprogram
Your Eclipse Computer" where I learned about microcode and that assembler
wasn't really the true bare metal of a CPU :) I have other war stories I
should write down some time.

~~~
bcantrill
Sorry to sell DG short! (I _did_ give it a brief mention at the top, it was
just very very brief.) For whatever it's worth, I did go into DG in more depth
in my blog entry on re-reading of _Soul_ last year[1] -- one that attracted
some comments from some very closely associated with the company and book!

[1] [http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/02/10/reflecting-on-the-
sou...](http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/02/10/reflecting-on-the-soul-of-a-
new-machine/)

~~~
teh_klev
Hey no worries Bryan. Reading your article there just triggered a re-read of
Soul for myself :)

------
Animats
And we'll deal with all those old standards by having our own new standard!

He discusses "open firmware", which is not Open Firmware.[1] That was a boot
ROM system from the 1990s. It was written in Forth, and was intended for use
with a console interface. That's not what you want today. A good question to
ask is, what do you want today at that level, and what do you _not_ want. For
example, a security oriented "cloud" company might want to load the machine,
restart the machine, and freeze and dump the machine in an emergency, but
_not_ have the ability to examine or alter memory while running. Who patches a
running production machine any more? Today's server firmware, with an
administrative CPU that phones home and listens for commands to do who knows
what, tends to have way too much capability for making small changes quietly
and listening to what's going on.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware)

------
spikepuppet
I'm a big fan of Bryan's talks and this was another great one. It's easy to
forget that once you move outside of the hyperscalers, what's available to you
is really showing it's age, or is filled with a whole bunch of honestly
useless features. As such, i'm very keen to see what Oxide cooks up!

------
guerrilla
> While our software systems have become increasingly elastic, the physical
> substrate available to run that software (that is, the computer!) has
> remained stuck in a bygone era of PC architecture. Hyperscale infrastructure
> providers have long since figured this out, building machines that are fit
> to purpose -- but those advances have been denied to the mass market. In
> this talk, we will talk about our vision for a new, rack-scale, server-side
> machine -- and how we anticipate advances like open firmware, RISC-V, and
> Rust will play a central role in realizing that vision.

~~~
justicezyx
This is a bland PR oriented statement. I was roughly expecting this level of
details from the speaker.

The one statement feels rather bland: "those advances have been denied to the
mass market"

What does this mean?

It was not denied, they were just too complex for mass market. People are
happy to pay AWS so that they can worry not the machines, and write JS code
from day one.

~~~
bcantrill
No, they've been denied: I elaborate on this in the talk, but if you look at
(say) an OCP-based system (e.g., Facebook's Tioga Pass[1]), the innovations in
that system are simply not available for any price to the enterprise buyer.
And yes, those buyers emphatically _do_ exist -- and no, they are certainly
not everyone deploying on elastic infrastructure.

[1] [https://www.opencompute.org/documents/facebook-2s-server-
tio...](https://www.opencompute.org/documents/facebook-2s-server-tioga-pass-
specification)

~~~
justicezyx
There was always a need of making something commercially successful. But there
needs to be proportional demand to justify.

OCP cannot produce their products to mass market unless there is a strong
demand. Certainly it looks like market mainstream is not too passionate about
building or managing their machines.

I don't deny that some people, in any circumstances, would demand different
offerings from the market mainstream.

And I am totally understanding why such statement like "a was denied to b" was
used here.

I was merely stating, for mass market, there is no serious demand for what's
claimed to be denied from them. And I am stating that from a more technical
perspective nor a marketing or PR one. (And I am very positive about the
necessity of marketing and PR)

~~~
kaliszad
There are so many old (and frankly even new) line of business applications,
where the developers haven't considered among other things laws of physics
like speed of light in optical fiber much. These systems (client+server
applications) tend to run much better on premise. The applications are often
not automated much, aren't really secured that well (so you would probably
need a VPN to the cloud to run it safely) and the bandwidth of internet
connections at some of these companies are not really suitable for clients on
premise and servers in the cloud anyway. You are lucky, if the synchronization
to a different location works well enough.

Also, cloud is very costly if you don't use the up and especially down scaling
because your application/ infrastructure wasn't really designed for that. Also
if you buy some new machine for the factory it usually comes with software
(usually MS Windows Server + MS SQL Server + some machine control software)
that has hardware requirements that don't really fit well with cloud pricing.
Such machines tend to run for decades and the company certainly hasn't thought
about being efficient with computing resources on the server. On premise
hardware isn't that costly if you consider these factors, if the supplier
cannot secure the machine properly, you slap it into its own VLAN and write an
ACL for the RDP access (because that is how it is) and are done with it.
Basically dedicated Gigabit speed with very little latency for any
communication between the clients and the server. Remember, you are almost
lucky if a Windows Update doesn't break the software/ software license on the
server or the client...

------
guerrilla
Would someone like to tl;dr? I can't tell whether I want to watch this 1h26m
video based on its vague title.

------
steveklabnik
This is probably the most thorough public explanation of what we're doing over
at Oxide.

~~~
jpm_sd
Got a TL;DW for us? Video is 86 minutes long.

~~~
steveklabnik
The sibling comment is good.

The problem that we're trying to solve is basically laid out on this slide:
[https://youtu.be/vvZA9n3e5pc?list=PLoROMvodv4rMWw6rRoeSpkise...](https://youtu.be/vvZA9n3e5pc?list=PLoROMvodv4rMWw6rRoeSpkiseTHzWj6vu&t=1055)

The business is "we will be selling servers." You can't buy any yet, but in
the future, you'll be able to.

The talk lays out a history of servers, describes the problems with the
servers that you can buy from vendors today, and lays out why we think we can
build better ones.

~~~
armitron
Good luck, you will need lots of it.

------
stevebmark
A 1.5 hour video with no context and no TL;DR top comment did NOT make it
organically to the top of HN, it was upvoted strategically by members of
Oxide. Could you at least do the rest of us a solid and post the TL;DR?

