Can I Tell You a Secret? I See Dead Systems
summary
Modern systems carry 40+ year old cruft that still shapes behavior: sending an interrupt to the keyboard controller on every boot to switch CPU mode (the 8042 hack), X11 from 1984 remaining default in Ubuntu 18.04 and crippling graphics performance, and entire CPUs like Itanium shipping an x86 interpreter/JIT to run legacy code. Examples extend to SMS-as-2FA, magnetic stripe cards, 8" disks in critical kit. Concrete countermeasures: design extensible protocols, exportable data formats, explicit deprecation and upgrade paths.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Start
- 0:51Many many years ago
- 3:42Let's talk about terminals
- 4:19X Windows
- 5:17The CPU wars
- 6:42Guess what Intel did YO DAWG I HEARD U LIKE RISC
- 8:27You think that's bad?
- 9:23I wasn't kidding about the nuclear missiles
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