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points by BadlyDrawnBoy 3 days ago | 0 comments
>I believe our current work environments will be romanticized one day, in a similar way - we just don’t recognize the fun parts of the mundane.

I cant see it. I was in the embedded dev world from the early 90s to mid 2000s before I moved into infrastructure architecture. The mostly homogeneous world we currently live in is just not even close to what we had in the 90s. At one point I had a Next Cube, an IBM RS/6000 (AIX 4.x Unix), a BeBox (BeOS), an OS/2 system (PPC), a Sun SparcStation and 2 x NT 3.x system (x86 and PPC) all sat in my office at the same time. The diversity of hardware and operating systems is just not comparable to today. It was an exciting time of rapid development and change and we were aware of it. Much different to what we have now where we just like to pretend we are in a time of rapid development and change but the reality is incremental change and small increments at that outside of AI

I havent found anything in the IT world to excite me for close to 20 years. The expanding core counts were interesting to start with but soon got boring. The introduction of ARM was hardly an excitement. RISC-V is dead as far as performance designs go though its a great micro controller arch. Software is abstraction layer piled on top of abstraction layer piled on top of abstraction layer. There is almost nothing new and hasn't been for a long time

[–] TheAmazingRace 3 days ago
IBM Power is technically still around, albeit it's not quite as easy to find these days. I'm thinking of getting some kind of Power11 box, just to keep the monoculture out of my home lab for as long as possible.
[–] kjs3 1 day ago
I think the same thing, then I price a Power 11 (or Power 10) machine. Ouch. I even kinda liked AIX, even though it is definitely it's own thing. We had such hope for OpenPower but it never came to anything.
[–] smm11 3 days ago
I'm at a letter agency, and the way we work with hands tied behind our backs reminds me of how we worked in the early 90s. It's still out there, you just have to find it.