Yes. I was just talking to my prof./boss today who worked at Stanford, PARC and later Interval about moving some things to Dropbox, arguing that it's a better long-term solution since it's just <i>the file-system</i> and the system doesn't rely on any specific representation (such as a database) or syncing mechanism (can be swapped for rsync, git, AeroFS, etc.). Hearing this, he launched into a rant about distributed file-systems (like AFS) and how hierarchical file-systems are themselves a specific and ultimately transient technology. Working with him and another fellow who was hacking UNIX in the early 80's, you get a sense of a sort of terminal frustration from having witnessed the golden years of research in computers first-hand and the subsequent failure of most of those ideas to manifest.

Today's computing is built mostly on tools that were originally cheap hacks intended to be replaced. If you have not watched the videos above, for the sake of our future, please do.

What about the progress being made by file systems? btrfs, for example, includes some amazing abilities.

And what about git's content addressing?

Progress comes in fits and starts, and not where we expect it.

"git's content addressing" existed earlier than git: hg and monotone do it.

And long before those, plan9's venti.

Ward's Wiki is wonderful. It totally reminds me of the old days, when a website was nothing more than a collection of hypertext links.

The original rant really does make a good point about how accessible things once were. Gosh even being 24 I remember the days of screwing around with logo and qbasic and hacking serial ports with zterm. It's not that everything 'just worked' then (It didn't) but that if it didn't work you could still get something useful out of the machine. The layers of abstraction from the hardware have grown so much now that nothing makes sense.

I wish there was a video of "The Mother of All Demos" where you could actually read the text.