You can still have a useful machine without it being connected to the public Internet. Network access is indeed very important, Internet connectivity, less so.
I too rue the loss of simplicity ... and this has been voiced by many people much more luminous than I ... Ken Thompson, for one, has commented about the size and complexity in contemporary UNIX implementations ... This is one reason why I love Plan 9 so much ... it takes you back a little bit to when it was a pleasure to bang out a little code and you don't have to deal with so much nonsense to get a little application that actually does something, built. Best, Sean On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Noel Chiappa <j...@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: > > From: Liam Proven > > I am _very much_ in sympathy with the complaints here; I too feel that > modern > computers are too complex, etc. (Although some of it, like the entire > computer > turning into a single chip, were/are inevitable/unavoidable.) > > I like the functionality of modern system, but I feel they are _more > complex > than they need to be_ to generate that level of functionality. > > However, one thing I am going to quibble with: > > > This is a nice explanatory quote: > > > The main reasons TempleOS is simple and beautiful are because it's > > ring-0-only .. Linux wants to be a secure, multi-user mainframe. ... > > It was simple, open and hackable. It was not networked. ... It was > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > simple and unsecure. If you don't have malware and you don't have > > bugs, protection just slows things down and makes the code > complicated. > > Note the part I highlighted. If you want to have a system that's > network-capable, which is pretty much mandatory for a _really_ usable > system > in this day and age, i) that means Web-capable, and ii) if it's Web-capable > today, it has to be able to handle what I dub 'active content' (JavaScript, > etc) - i.e. content coming off the network which contains code, which runs > in > the local machine. > > To paraphrase a certain well-known SF work, IMO active content is probably > the > worst idea since humans' fore-fathers crawled out of the mud. It's > _potentially_ a giant, gaping security hole - one that in today's OS's is > responsible for a huge share of security issues. (There _is_ a way to have > systems which aren't as vulnerable, but it means having military-grade > security on everyone's machine - and no, I don't mean crypto; probably not > likely, alas.) I mourn the early days of the Web, when there was no active > content - just text, images, etc, etc. But no, they had to add all sorts of > flashy eye candy - and did so in a way that makes basically all modern > machines horribly insecure. But let me dispense with the soap box... > > Anyway, the inevitable consequence is that if you want a networked machine, > it's _not_ going to be simple. Alas. > > You're basically sharing the machine with _lots_ of other people - > effectively, every Tom, Dick and Jane out there in the Internet. In other > words, you need everything one normally saw/sees in a time-sharing machine. > (And I'm not talking about wimpy ones like Unix/Linux. I mean industrial > strength ones like Multics.) > > Noel >