There is a special breed of engineer who reserves their greatest esteem for dusty old workhorse systems: those operating systems and networking protocols and museum piece hardware systems designed decades ago that typically go unseen and unloved.
Whether or not you count yourself as one of this strange group of folk, you’ve got to admit that they can tell a good story! Thankfully, almost twenty such systems lovers came out yesterday to tell their own favorite systems stories, as part of Systems We Love.
This is one of the most enjoyable conferences I’ve attended, so I was glad to see the full recording posted today. Unfortunately it’s hard to find individual talks within the video, so I thought I’d post timestamped links into each talk (the links are in the titles… sorry they’re easy to miss) along with a few of my own notes.
Roger’s /proc by Ryan Zezeski
This was an awesome talk about the rationale and history of /proc, what ultimately became an elegant interface to a tremendously complex system of processes and their scheduling.
Life of an Airline Flight: What Systems Get You From Here to There via the Air by Adam Fletcher
This talk was a very enjoyable overview of the scheduling, inventory management, reservation and other systems that coordinate behind the scenes to enable us to fly commercially. It was particularly interesting to see that systems like SABRE were so ahead of their time, enough so that they’ve been able to avoid much innovation for the last five or so decades! I’m looking forward to reading Adam’s book recommendation Hard Landing.
Man, ‘splained: 40-Plus Years of Man Page History by Breanne Boland
This was a great talk, and excellent choice of topic for a 20min talk. Breanne obviously loves man pages and hopes you will too :)
Persistent Virtual Memory in the Great New Operating System In the Sky by James Larkby-Lahet
This was a very interesting talk about a couple of old systems that anticipated the cloud computing trend that wouldn’t arrive for another decade or two. I personally spent much of the talk thinking about what ideas from GNOSIS/KeyKOS could see a resurgence once we nonvolatile RAM becomes cheap and prevalent. Unfortunately it looks like James had a slide on this that he skipped over for lack of time :(
7074 says Hello World by Marianne Bellotti
It looks like this session wasn’t recorded, which is a shame because it was a fascinating look at some of Marianne’s work with the USDS, helping to make sense of how the federal government is using some wonderful old (and new) mainframes.
Less Ado About NTP by Bryan Fink
Bryan really knows and loves NTP. This was a solid intro, shorter but just as clear as his recent Papers We Love talk.
Weenix: The system that inspired generations of systems lovers by Jordan Hendricks
It was great to hear about weenix, a teaching operating system implemented by students at Brown. I hadn’t heard of it, despite using MIT’s similar project JOS with students at Bradfield. The creators of projects like this put an enormous amount of work into them; I’m sure they’re glad to see them changing the lives of folk like Jordan.
The Charming Genius of the Apollo Guidance Computer by Brian Troutwine
This was a favorite talk of mine, about an amazingly effective and practical system from the glory years of US technological progress. A must watch in my opinion.
I. Love. BGP. by Richard Kiene
This was another great choice of topic for a 20min talk, and a very enjoyable talk. I loved hearing about the history of BGP; it was a surprise to see how… err… improvised it was, given the technical calibre of its designers.
Interrupts, that which scared Djikstra by Irfan Ahmad
This was a very illuminating talk, introducing the design decisions involved in the introduction of interrupts, and developing as far as Irfan’s own interesting work into interrupt coalescing in virtual machines.
Lessons from the Cell: What Software Developers Can Learn From Biochemical Systems by Sarah Lohmeier
I think I must have been hypocaffeinated at this point because I don’t recall much about Sarah’s talk unfortunately :(
The Design of the UNIX Terminal by Jesse Hathaway
This was a great talk that covered both terminals and the UNIX shell. We often see students with a hazy understanding of the differences between these (and terminal emulators) so it’s good to have somewhere to point them now!
A Race Detector Unfurled by Kavya Joshi
Kavya does a great job of introducing the motivation for a race detector and explaining the use of ThreadSanitizer in Go. It looks like she also gave a longer version of the talk at this year’s Strangeloop.
Down memory lane: Two decades with the slab allocator by Bryan Cantrill
No surprise that Bryan’s talk was one of the most entertaining. Jeff Bonwick’s slab allocator was a great innovation, designed well enough to continue serving its purpose without any dramatic changes for over two decades. Bryan’s enthusiasm for it and the connection to his own history was a joy to experience.
DNS and the Art of Making Systems “Just Complex Enough” by Alex Wilson
Am I allowed to have another favorite? This was another excellently crafted, entertaining talk, covering a good amount of the genesis and design of DNS. As with many talks, there were some interesting aspects of the history of the protocol that I hadn’t seen covered elsewhere.
“You are Not Expected to Understand This”, But You Will by Arun Thomas
This was one of my favorite talks of the day, explaining the context switching code both in UNIX v6 and FreeBSD. Nothing should be a black box, even when Dennis Ritchie says it’s ok!
An AWK love story by Cody Mello
AWK is a fantastic little language that Cody obviously loves and does a great job of selling :)
UTF-8 by Daniel Morsing
UTF-8 is an impressive and commonly confused technology so it’s great that Daniel did a talk on this. It was ambitious, though, since it’s so hard to beat Joel Spolsky’s The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
Card-Based Systems: On the Complex, Tactile, and Material Qualities of Cards in Computing by Amelia Abreu
Amelia definitely took a different approach to her talk and touched on some disparate but interesting ideas through a lens that many of us wouldn’t have used before, that of the “card” as a common motif in computing. I agree that cards in computing are interesting, but if you only have 20min to dedicate to the topic I would go first to James Burke’s bit in Connections about the evolution of the Jacquard loom and how it ultimately lead to Hollerith’s tabulator.
That’s it! 19 great talks from what I hope will be the first of many Systems We Love conferences. Until the next one, be sure to check out your local chapter of Papers We Love.
