the death of UNIX
you don't really see much of computer architectures these days. all you really have now is x86 and ARM, with their dozens of embedded and low-power variants running on basically every new thing that comes out of an assembly line. i'm not really talking about embedded hardware though. i'm talking about big home computers, something you'd set down on a desk and use daily, or servers that you leave in the corner of a server room somewhere to run apache or PHP or whatever, embedded machines are unimportant to me.
intel's itanium was an expensive but recoverable mistake for intel, and was an unmitigated disaster for the UNIX world. before itanium began production, each vendor provided its own customized platform, containing a combination of unique RISC chips, POSIX-compliant UNIXes that had various abritrary quirks inherited from their predecessors and many, many support fees that upper management paid without a second thought of a cheaper alternative. and life was... good I guess, nobody really paid attention or cared outside of the IT nerds.
here's a list of the various CPU architectures that were available for licensing before itanium was first released onto the market:
- DEC Alpha
- MIPS
- PA-RISC
- PowerPC
- SPARC
- x86
and here's a list after itanium dropped:
- MIPS
- PowerPC
- SPARC
- x86
do you see what's happening here? well you probably do, anyone that cares this much about itanium knows that PA-RISC and Alpha got wiped because of intel's unification efforts. and it wasn't just the ISAs that were homogenized, most UNIXes met the same fate as well. before itanium, there was actual variety in the UNIX scene that went beyond modifying the distribution for their custom hardware, with some of them actively trying to build something that you really couldn't get on anything else just for the sake of innovation! outside of the hobbyist world, nobody has tried to build a true 21st-century microkernel system and put it in a computer or phone (almost nobody but this case is a little complicated).
but then again, isn't it good that everything has centralized into two or three systems and chips? maybe i'm just navel-gazing with nostalgia towards the past and coming up with bad ideas for small problems that don't exist anymore. i think the appeal is just the presence of a vector of experimentation with computers again. maybe I just want another amiga, a third pillar of sorts that exists for some niche purpose that can't be properly filled by the others. i've also completely lost track on what I was supposed to be writing about, other than the general theme of "what if computers were cool and unnecessarily complex and incompatible with each other", and how it's a shame that there isn't a new Sun workstation with a cool SPARC chip in it that only runs solaris because of the century-long series of UNIX wars that only retirees remember. so what do I really want to say?
what do I really want?
what I really want is a POSIX-based UNIX system running risc-v or some other ISA chip thing that boots up to a weird skin of a motif DE, can't run anything built for linux and is basically a platform to dick around with. i want something like serenityOS but a bit lighter, where everything is independent and built just for itself without any external dependencies. i want something that feels like a cool bedroom coder computer to tinker with late into the night, not something where you have to deal with the internet and all these developer stacks that don't make sense to a pleb like me.
maybe it's just me pondering on old, dead projects or me watching too many commodore videos but I want a microcomputer that is like the commander X16 but higher-spec. do younger people even care about the commander X16? it seems like an oldhead project to me, for electronics guys that want a new commodore machine but are tired of assembling new C64 kits again. i don't even know what the fuck I'm saying, i'm just completely out of my mind and unable to express myself properly so I'll whine in a fourth-wall way of how it's fake and gay to do so. matter of fact, I should probably look into RISC OS that'll scratch my itch for old-school bedroom coder style programming. maybe.