On 26 Nov 2009, at 9:18 pm, W B Hacker wrote:
Tim Newsham wrote:
or the cannonical example, a hard drive.
I intentionally avoided this one because two things that modern
OSs do know how to share (at least a little) are:
- filesystems
- printers
Its just all the other stuff that they haven bothered to tackle
yet, except in very specific applications (ie. remote desktop
access).
- erik
Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | thenewsh.blogspot.com
Actually, they have ...
'Big iron' quite aside [1], it was common (at least) as far back as
CP/M 2.X to share peripherals such as prom-blasters, text-to-speech
gear, terminals, serial and parallel ports across multiple
machines. Not everything needed was in the as-shipped 'OS', but it
was not hard to code the rest.
By the time Netware, IBM OS/2 (and perhaps Win-?? - not my area of
expertise) came along it was tick-the-box easier to share, for
example, a modem or scanner, just as easily as a printer or storage
device. IOW - streaming 'near real time' devices as well as spooled
or (actual) file-based services.
Plan9 didn't 'invent' any of this.
Plan9 just prioritized it and provided a more appropriate
infrastructure and toolset to make for easier and more ubiquitous
use of it all.
That one or more folks are now seeing a need to reinvent that
particular set of wheels is curious, as it never actually went away
- Plan9 or otherwise.
I think this sharing dropped off drastically at some point in fairly
recent history. I took a look at Apple's list of services and devices
which can be shared with a checkbox or two; it really was a much
shorter list than I thought, and I'm sure the most convenient Linux
distro has a couple less items again.
Windows I'm not so sure about, but I don't think you have to go back
many years to find the time when Windows 98 was the most common
Windows, and what did that offer to share? Printers and files only,
if I remember right.
Perhaps the old saw about 'ethnics' (pick yer own favorite..) and
garbage.
"We never actually throw anything away, we just kick it from place
to place until its gets lost."
Bill
[1] AN/FSQ-7 and AN/GSA-51, could of course 'share' their resources
- or at lest take-over, one from another. But that sort of thing
has been MIL-SPEC since about 8,000 years before a certain French
Colonel of Dragoons gave up his military career to lay the
groundwork for the Plan9 user interface.
