interesting similarities to "hardware partitioning" of IBM mainframes

Posted Sep 21, 2025 23:13 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: interesting similarities to "hardware partitioning" of IBM mainframes by dale.hagglund
Parent article: Multiple kernels on a single system

> Anyway, this new multi-kernel work could be used in many different and useful ways, as others have already noted, but it's always interesting to see how essentially every "new" idea has antecedents in the past.

There is a gazillion different potential reasons for that: the solution was in search of a problem, it was too expensive, it was not mature yet, it broke backwards compatibility too much, it was mature and successful for a while but displaced by less convenient but much cheaper commodity solutions, etc.

1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. The lone inventor and its eureka! moment is probably the least common case but it makes the best stories to read or watch and they massively skew our perception. Our tribal brain is hardwired for silver bullets and miracles and "allergic" to slow, global and real-world evolutions. Not just for science and technology, it's the same for economics, war, sociology, climate, etc.

interesting similarities to "hardware partitioning" of IBM mainframes

Posted Sep 22, 2025 22:10 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> There is a gazillion different potential reasons for that: the solution was in search of a problem, it was too expensive, it was not mature yet, it broke backwards compatibility too much, it was mature and successful for a while but displaced by less convenient but much cheaper commodity solutions, etc.

It wasn't interesting to Universities? (So students never knew about it.)

Cheers,
Wol