was: The System360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That

Your fairy dust is not working. Competing fairies have counter spells in place. Use is changing, evolving. Kicking and flogging are ineffective means to attaind lift. Morale will not improve even after the beatings stop.

I think Packard told that to Woz.

I also think that Thompson was inspired to develop pipes about I-O (truly brilliant).

It is true that physical laws govern this stuff.

However, after that, an almost infinite number of algorithms and data structures exist to try all kinds of paradigms (consider Backus trying to save the world with functional languages). Hell the 2 major computer players could not agree on the order of bits in a word much less word sizes. Old ideas exist, the phrase "graceful degradation" on ARPAnet computing comes to mind. Some of those ideas deserve a chance, before they are completely lost, but computing is one of those supertankers which take 10 miles to do a 180.

We don't need SNA, we don't need NCP, we can probably take some of the ideas from DECnet, the world can likely do without BNA and X.25, etc.

It's we who make those decisions and developments.

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