Flutterby™! : Memory lane

Brainwagon: My trip down memory lane leads me back to TOPS-10 and the PDP-10 has garnered some interesting comments. Rupert Goodwins note spoke to me a bit about innovation, especially since I've been looking at that in the context of big high risk mass manufactured engineering projects recently:

t’s interesting, those comments about an OS devoted to micromanaging its own resources. It puts me in mind of the OSI/ISO TCP/IP wars, where things like X.400 were designed by committees of Big Company telco-ites to be rigorously compatible with the layered control-minded bureaucracy in whose service such things were rightly to be retained. SMTP et al were smart, quick, dirty and unrestrained – if you wanted to do the job, it was there to help you. Both could profitably have learned from each other, but I’m so glad the long-hairs won. If only for a while, perhaps.