Big Iron speedrun any% https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMRCye4JhEo&list=PL5ty576dcO...
(we need a bit of silly in our lives)
CEREAL
Oh yeah, you want a seriously righteous hack,
you score one of those Gibsons man. You know,
supercomputers they use to like, do physics,
and look for oil and stuff?
PHREAK
Ain't no way, man, security's too tight. The
big iron?
DADE
Maybe. But, if I were gonna hack some heavy
metal, I'd, uh, work my way back through some
low security, and try the back door.Here's another great historic oral history panel with a live demo of Xerox PARC's Cedar, including Eric Bier, Nick Briggs, Chris Jacobi, and Paul McJones:
Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar
This interpretive production was created from archival footage of Eric Bier, PARC research scientist, demonstrating the Cedar integrated environment and programming language on January 24, 2019. Cedar was an evolution of the Mesa environment/language, developed at PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory originally for the Xerox Alto. Mesa was modular and strongly-typed, and influenced the later Modula family of languages. Cedar/Mesa ran on the D-machine successors to the Alto (such as the Dorado) and added features including garbage collection, and was later ported to Sun workstations. Cedar/Mesa’s integrated environment featured a graphical window system and a text editor, Tioga, which could be used for both programming and document preparation, allowing for fonts, styles, and graphics to be embedded in code files. The editor and all its commands were also available everywhere, including on the command console and in text fields. The demo itself is running through a Mac laptop remotely logged into Bier’s Sun workstation at PARC using X Windows. Bier demonstrates the Cedar development environment, Tioga editor, editing commands using three mouse buttons, sophisticated text search features, the command line, and the Gargoyle graphics editor, which was developed as part of Bier’s UC Berkeley Ph.D. dissertation. Bier is joined by Nick Briggs, Chris Jacobi, and Paul McJones.
Honestly mainframes sound like what on-premise aims for. You get uptime and proactive maintenance and stuff just runs. Yet the machine is on your premise and the data belongs to you.
Jacobi is one of 70 IBM Fellows (think IBM internal professors, free reign over a research budget, you gain the title with technical prowess plus business acumen)
at the heart of the Mainframe success is this:
> I’d say high-availability and resiliency means many things, but in particular, two things. It means you have to catch any error that happens in the system - either because a transistor breaks down due to wear over the lifetime, or you get particle injections, or whatever can happen. You detect the stuff and then you have mechanisms to recover. You can't just add this on top after the design is done, you have to be really thinking about it from the get-go.
and then he goes into details how that is achieved. the article nicely goes into some details.
oh and combine the 99.9999999% availability "nine nines" with insane throughput. as in real time phone wiretapping throughput, or real time mass financial transactions, of course.
or a web server for an online image service.
or "your personal web server in a mouse click", sharing 10.000 such virtual machines on a single physical machine. which has a shared read only /ist partition mounted into all guests. not containers, no, virtual machines, in ca 2006...
"don't trust a computer you can lift"