[ColorForth] OS is Not a Dirty Word

[Jeff Fox <fox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Kurt B. Kaiser" wrote:
> The little mammals evolve and insinuate 
> themselves into the environment.

When I used the little mammals eating dinosoaur
eggs regarding micros and mainframes thirty years
ago people thought I was nuts.  I was physicist
too and they were the computer experts!

There were 1000 arguemnt why those little things
are not computers and will not ever amount to
anything.  They have no place, they don't fit in,
they can't fit it, etc.

Ten years ago I started in again.  We all
had micros much bigger than our old mainframes
that were BIG dinos.  I thought someone might 
have learned a lesson in twenty years. ZOOM!  
Thirty years? ZOOM!

Well some people do get it.  It is fun reading
what the people in this list say.  And
very thought provoking to me.  I hope people
don't mind my rants.  I won't be doing too
many unless you think I already have. ;-)

> Well, I don't know if we'll get a cataclysmic event. 
> Maybe a superwormvirus?

Simple structural collapse has been predicted by
real experts not just people with a strong opinion
and sense of the future like myself.

> But if traffic builds enough, and it makes sense to 
> build our own network
> backbones which don't support TCP/IP, and that will 
> _look_ like a cataclysmic event in hindsight =)

The most bizzare idea I have come accros regarding
F21 and networks and protocols was the suggestion
the echo timer could be used on the network to
get sub-nanosecond collision detection and
recovery.  Many people were quick to classify
that as insane.

I wonder what kind of ideas Chuck would come
up with if he focused on the whole network
and router problem.  I suspect that he
would cook it down.  He has already said
that perhaps he is just nieve about routers
but that he doesn't think of them as 
complicated things.

But of course he could boil down specs to
improve TCP/IP without breaking it.  If
he could break it and start over with 
completely new hardware and software.
I think to the user it would be like
free cache-coherent network fabric
with so much bandwidth and bizzare
featurs that you could things like
using the space between you and a 
communications satelight as a storage
ring. ;-)

As for the whole system,
one thing is that one tiny change that does look
good really could bring everyting crashing down
in very unpredictable ways.  Like non-pre-bent
wheels might.

It is like Doug Adams' Babelfish.  So improbably
wonderfully amazing and unlikely that only God
could have created it, but if he had this would
have proven his existence, and since the belief
in the existence of God requires faith and
thus God is not allowed to provide proof of
himself, the Babelfish was considered to be 
the final proof of the non-existence of God.

I won't tell you what happened next.

Also as to be expected this thing with more
potential than anything ever imagined was of
course the worst idea that this civilization
ever had and resulted in its total destruction
for reasons that must be obvious.  If not
consult your copy of the Guide.
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