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The slides gloss "systems" in this context as "Operating systems, networking, languages; the things that connect programs together." See https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.html if you don't see it in the PDF. He's definitely not talking about only operating system kernels. JS, Ruby, PHP, Rails, Docker, AWS, Redis, and Kafka are solidly in that wheelhouse (though, to be fair, JS, Ruby, and PHP did exist in 02000, Pike just didn't know they were important). Some of them couldn't have been built with the base OS primitives common in 02000: Docker requires cgroups, for example, and AWS requires virtualization or (originally) paravirtualization. Paravirtualization came out of Keir Fraser's doctoral research. You don't have to write a system that has no connection to the existing ecosystem in order to be doing systems software research, or even relevant systems software research. Also though the Web has been pretty much redone from the ground up since 02000. |
Rather: An insane uncontrolled growth of extensions appeared since 2000. The only in my opinion serious attempt to redo the web from ground up that existed in this timeframe was XHTML 2.0 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=XHTML&oldid=11002...). Since the arrival of HTML5 (which was a "let's standardize the wild zoo of extensions that already exist at least a little bit instead of redoing things from ground up in an organized way") XHTML 2.0 is dead.