[LMG S12] Issue 144: Programs-in-a-vat
Previously: The Apple M1 is a souped-up iPhone processor, with unified memory.
I want to circle back to talking about processors again in this season, because there are a couple of pretty world-shaking ideas I haven’t fully fleshed out in Layman’s Guide yet.
One of them is—hmm where do I begin. As early as 1641, in Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes proposes that “All that up to the present time I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses; but it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive, and it is wiser not to trust entirely to anything by which we have once been deceived.” In other words, Descartes isn’t always sure that he believes what he sees; his senses sometimes deceive him about the nature of reality.
More than three centuries later, in 1999, the Wachowski brothers translate this idea into a more modern form: what if the world as we know it is a simulation running on some other cosmic, otherworldly hardware? Is it possible to signal to our senses so convincingly that a simulacrum may be thought of as real?
Hold that thought, because this is the Layman’s Guide to Computing, not Philosophy (although there is plenty of that in Computing as well!). For millennials like me who came of age in the early noughties, The Matrix defined the zeitgeist for the next couple of decades, whatever one may think of its aesthetics. It is difficult to overcredit it with this.
VMware is founded
But allow me to put a little dent in that reputation: the year is 1998, in Palo Alto, California. A company named VMware had just been founded. One year later, in 1999, they demoed and launched VMware Workstation, their first product. In that demo, engineers demonstrated how VMware Workstation could allow users to run MS-DOS, Linux, FreeBSD, and multiple versions of Windows—that’s multiple operating systems (OS)—off a single machine.
The release of VMware Workstation probably happened too late to influence the direction of The Matrix, but no doubt there was talk in the air of virtualising OSes in the years leading up to it. To be clear, this is not dual-booting, in which a user can choose, through a boot menu, which OS to boot into (Issue 112). We are talking about multiple OSes, running simultaneously, off a single machine.
How does such a thing happen?
Issue summary: In 1999, VMware launched VMware Workstation, which allowed multiple operating systems to run off a single machine.
What I’ll be covering next
Next issue: [LMG S12] Issue 145: What an app wants, what an app needs
What enables an operating system to function, convinced it has full control of hardware? For that matter, how would it even know if the hardware ... is really hardware?
... 👻
Sometime in the future: What is:
- XSS? [Issue 8]
- a good reason developers write code and give it away for free online? [Issue 21]
- OpenType? And what are fonts anyway? [Issue 42]