LIS-3353 - History of Operating Systems
Created Tuesday 16 September 2025
A L'IL ECON
The marginal cost of software (and anything else "digital") is zero,
and economics (for better or worse) tells us that its real price will approach zero.
A reasonable idea
If software is infinitely reproduceable and can be shared everywhere for free;
then no piece of software should *ever* be rewritten;
and everyone should always have the best one.
A reasonable idea THAT DEFINITELY DID NOT HAPPEN
If software is infinitely reproduceable and can be shared everywhere for free;
then no piece of software should *ever* be rewritten;
and everyone should always have the best one.
Instead?
A lot of people are sharing and that is awesome...but also
to figure out how things are going,
consider software more as a free resource, not so much a product
NNT's "Lindy"
A good predictor of how long something will be around in the future..
... is how long it has been around in the past
Evolution
Individual pieces of software are sometimes intelligently designed...
...but the ecosystem is DEFINITELY evolution.
Evolution (sometimes sucks)
(i.e., a lot makes no sense
Our knees TOTALLY bend the wrong way.
Luggage wheels.
Y'all.
We put a man on the moon before we put wheels on luggage.
ARE YOU SERIOUS.
Quick tech example: HTML
What do we use it for?
Documents? (Nope, we use the worst program ever, instead)
or
A weird base of literally all of web programming.
LAW
yeah, if that existed on the internet that'd be nice
JOKING SORT OF (I take this seriously a bit later..)