Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Everything that's old is new again

As I was reading today about Verizon joining the LiMo Foundation it struck me how ideas get recycled. Specifically here I'm talking about computer operating systems and all these new systems being based on Linux, which is substantially a UNIX clone. In the beginning there was UNIX (okay, in the beginning their was Multics) dominated by the command line and then the rise of the graphical operating systems like Mac OS and Windows that baked their own kernel foundations. Now we find ourselves, in a way, moving back to UNIX.

The graphical operating systems were viewed as what would run on desktop computers in the future. This prediction was both right and wrong. It's true that the interface of the graphical systems was the future (and now present) of desktop operating systems, but their original underpinnings reverted to their predecessors. Windows of all flavors now runs on the NT architecture, which while not having a strict UNIX heritage, borrows many (although not enough) concepts from UNIX. Maybe if they'd borrowed more, the disaster that is Vista wouldn't have happened. Mac OS explicitly moved to UNIX when Apple bought NeXT and used this as the basis of Mac OS X. NeXT itself was based the Mach kernel and was very UNIX-like. Apple rolled in a BSD layer to OS X, solidifying Mac OS X as a UNIX operating system, which it recently gained certification as.

The question then comes to me, why did this happen? In fact, I think we see all over the place three phases of development. Phase I strikes into new territory, Phase II moves further into the territory with the idea that most of the ideas from Phase I were really flawed and should largely be abandoned, and Phase III often looks backs and realizes the things Phase I got right and puts them as an underpinning of the new ideas from Phase II. I think this shows very well in operating systems. Phase I produced these massive, powerful operating systems that were hard to use. In Phase II we decided that these complex systems were just all wrong and we needed to start from scratch focusing on ease of use. Now, in Phase III, it turns out Phase I was right about the power that the operating system needs and Phase II was right about the ease of use. As a result, we've put the underpinnings from Phase I back in and adapted Phase II interfaces to run on them.

There are probably many ways to explain this cycle back to UNIX kernels that we've taken, and perhaps betters. The lesson I try to take from all this is if you decide that a solution in a new problem space is completely off target, take a step back, there's probably a lot it go right. Apple commercials said "There is no step 3", I'm trying to get rid of step 2.

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