Jim Gray - A talk with THE SQL Guru and Architect

So Jim has been researching grid computing for ten years, like before we even started calling it grid computing. That's pretty forward looking!

I like what he said about conventional OS design being a very narrow, limited field compared to what it could be. I've been saying to people for some time how depressing it is that all this effort goes into writing OSs that are all more or less the same as unix. I claim that virtually every mainstream OS since unix has been unduly influenced by it. People look at me like I'm mad, like Windows is nothing like unix they say. But the concepts are very similar. All OSs seem to have a similar concept of processes, of file streams; filesystems are nearly all hierarchical. Files are uniformly byte-adressable flat files from an OS perspective. Even if you go back to msdos you can see the influence of unix. Version 1 was more or less like CP/M in that the filesystem didn't have directories and files were accessed using what was called FCBs (File Control Blocks). Version 2 arrives and FCBs are still supported, but now you have a unix-style streams interface and a hierarchical filesystem.

Most of the credit for this goes down to the pre-eminence of not only the C language but more importantly the C library that defined the API. Later developments like the Berkley implementation of TCP/IP played a similar role in ensuring that almost all network programming is the same.

But yes, with a few notable exceptions like PICK and OS/400 it seems that the concept of an operating system for most people was set in stone by unix. Also the concept of the database seems to have been set in stone when Oracle version 1 shipped.

And that's just a comment on one of the first things Jim mentions. Then there's a heck of a lot of interesting things about science so much so that I almost forgot what I was going to comment on by the time I got to the end of the video!