[nickpsecurity]

Funny he mentioned System/38, which largely eliminated users' storage worries, then says that company's rep never heard of it. Funny cuz they still sell it: IBM i. I posted a link [1] to original system on his site. It got so many things right in a business machine it was hard to believe. That old design still has better security and reliability than Windows or Linux boxes. Most AS/400 deployments I run into just don't... have... downtime... They also pretty much manage themselves.

I'd like to see FOSS do designs like that [minus the interface & API]. The labor advantage might lead to something pretty awesome. Meanwhile, they keep building complexity on top of UNIX architecture with a few stragglers on better OS architectures. Not much hope there. Fortunately, CHERI (capability) and SAFE (tags) are each building on mechanisms System/38 used for software reliability and security. An academic team or company might build something great on top of it. Still holding out some hope!

[1] http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/Chapter8.pdf

[vezzy-fnord]

Also worth noting is that IBM i had one of (if not probably the) first implementation of containers, in the form of LPARs.

[nickpsecurity]

True. Add that many "inventions" in virtualization field were in VM/370 in... the 70's. Including running itself on itself which has been celebrated in several news articles for different prototypes over the past few years. Except that was a production system. ;)

[cbd1984]

Add that IBM tried to kill VM multiple times, and wanted everyone using System/360 to standardize around OS/360.

"The Mythical Man-Month" is the story of OS/360. Hence VM still exists.

[nickpsecurity]

Lol @ last line. Well-put.