[cgh]

A company called Wang took this approach with their word processing workstations. It might have been before your time, but anyway, this approach has been tried before and it didn't really work out. General purpose hardware running a general purpose operating system that abstracts away that hardware's peculiarities won the day for a variety of reasons.

[gruseom]

Pendulums swing back the other way, though, when there's a game-changing advantage to be had. And server software that only has to produce well-formed output to be sent over the wire has considerable leeway in how those well-formed outputs get produced. We've seen that leeway be exploited in a major way at the programming language level, not so much at the OS level and not at all at the hardware level, yet. The question is what hidden advantages one might uncover by doing so.

[car54whereareu]

You must be right about Wang; I haven't heard of them.

Targeting xen instead of bare metal sounds better to me. openmirage is doing that with ocaml.

[ams6110]

Wow feeling old. Wang was a major supplier of purpose-built word processors for offices. 1970s timeframe. Prior to that they made sophisticated calculators for science and engineering and later finance.

Executives and most managers still had secretaries and dictated letters and memos. The Wang system was revolutionary. A multiuser, networkable word processing system that completely changed the game in terms of the time and effort necessary to produce typewritten documents.

They were supplanted in the 1980s by the more general purpose PC but definitely hold a significant place in the history of business computing.

[car54whereareu]

Well, do you think targeting xen api instead of bare metal is a good idea, or would that repeat history to no benefit?