[samstave]

You know =what would be cool: If all apps had to register their pref config files into a single dir and that would be tracked and snapshotted - and then you could just have ALL apps look to the same dir for where their configs come from and you could have a single repo for ALL apps on your or ANY system - and then you could walk up to a terminal and plug in your "license key" which said what apps you had access to and what ones you had configs for and you could just run that app with all your input and prefs and mappings etc...

I actually wrote a white paper on just this in ~2003 or so - and met with several engineers from google and they said it was impossible.

The idea being that you only carried around with you your profile, and you could just come to a dumb terminal, plug in your key, three factor auth - and the terminal would give you access to the apps and resources they had...

(I should write ((again)) a short story on this)

[unilynx]

This was basically the idea behind the Windows registry - a single configuration store. With mostly the same tree structure on Machine and User level, so your local prefs could override machine-level prefs. The 'user' part was portable between machines on a domain. And you have a single API to access or change settings

Opinions may differ on how well it was executed in practice. I'm not sure /etc/ with its hundreds of different file formats and Ansible or Chefs as an 'API' is that much better

[derefr]

> This was basically the idea behind the Windows registry.

Was it? I got the impression that the original (Windows 3.1) registry was a Windows-internal thing—a store of Windows settings, and a set of APIs to read and modify those Windows settings, e.g. COM/OLE class registrations. (See https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080117-00/?p=23...)

But then, third-party ISVs found the registry, and exploited it to store their own settings. And Microsoft being Microsoft, they accepted that unilateral design change and continued on with it.

[bboreham]

Prior to the registry most settings were in files like WIN.INI, and ISVs put settings there. The registry took this idea, added more structure and an API so simultaneous writes don’t screw up.

With the registry, each vendor puts its stuff under a path like HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\VendorName, even Microsoft.

[samstave]

Yep. The INI files were the original ways to store config info...

The registry was the next step. What would be great is an online serve for such - a machine gets booted and it asks for your config unam UUID etc - and then just slurps your snapshot down.

[bboreham]

When I first heard about Active Directory (1998?) I thought it would work a bit like this - a distributed Registry.

[saagarjha]

This is somewhat how user defaults work already.

[Demigod33]

> they said it was impossible

What reasons did they name?

[samstave]

OK, disclaimer - I am going on over a decade since this happened:

There was a phone that came out (nokia??) that had a docking station and you could have a screen on it and a keyboard attachement etc...

I presented this in ~2004-ish as a white paper... (lost to hundreds of machines since, and poor data mgmt over time)

I met with a few engineers friends from google over this idea and they said they didnt think it was possible (which at the time it was not - even though I wrote about it in 2001) - and then there was that phone that came out which allowed you to have a phone docking station and use it as your primary computer.

This was at the same time whilst I was talking to my buddies at Intel about stacked procs - and they were doing 64 cores in ~2004 in test dies... and they worked.

It was in 1998 when I was at Intel that I asked "Why cant we just stack multiple CPUs on top of eachother?" and was laughed at...

I sat right next to Andy Grove, but I only spent all my time in the DRG Game lab testing games on AMD and Celeron procs to get subjective results on game perf.

Anyway... I posed a lot of things that were laughed at, which then became reality later.

I worked with a MIPS proc eng about Slot-Rack-Servers, in 1995 - this was deemed impossible... later we have HPE based systems... His name was Kent... he was one of the chief MIPS designers...

I was saying "lets make 'slots' that we can install a switch, a server, storage or whatever on the backplane..."

Yes - I am not lying - these were just things I imagined in the early-mid-late 90s....

I had a good career - but I cannot take any credit for these taking production due to I didnt ever implement any of these ideas... aside from expressing them earlier than others who were far more capable of executing.

Its just like IFTT - I literally whiteboarded IFTT for a bunch of engineers from Lockheed a few years before that existed... They have built a lot of what you interact daily with (netflix) among others...

My soul flaw - is that I think of something early, I have no ability to bring it to fruition and even though I have exceptional famous engineers as friends, I cant bring my ideas to market...

and then a few years later - things I designed hit the zeitgeist and hit market...

I have, as a consultant, made people MANY billions of dollars - and havent received anything in return.