Dear Time Lords: Freeze Computers In 1993

This is a semi-satirical / joking-not-joking post (spun out of a private mastodon post) that I will be taking absolutely no questions or comments about. If it does not amuse you please do not tell me in gruesome well-actually detail why it is a bad idea.

My proposal: Computers should have stopped in 1993.

One might argue that I was an impressionable teenager in 1993 and so probably this is “just nostalgia speaking” but I think it is not true: the technologies I had access to at the time were not, mainly, those I will be discussing here. Instead, I claim that as an adult with more fluency in computers and computing history, I can make the recommendation here on the basis of that broader and more-objective view.

1. CPUs and Systems

The MIPS R4000 existed in 1993 and at 1.2 million transistors, this is about as complex as chips should ever have got. It’s got an MMU and FPU, is RISC, is 64 bit, in-order scalar superpipelined. It is predictable and simple and just right. There was a consortium (ACE) that shipped a spec (ARC) for open systems built on MIPS and several vendors were using it as their vision of the future. They should have been right!

(If you needed a portable computer you could have the R4000-based IBM WorkPad Z50 or, if you are a sicko, a Newton MessagePad which was not R4000 but we can allow 1993’s pleasantly small ARM6 chips as well, or 1992’s charming SH-2. Also you can even have some videogames: the PlayStation was R3000-based and the Nintendo 64 R4000-based, and the Sega Saturn was SH-2. If you really really hate MIPS, ARM and SuperH you can throw in the Alpha 21064 — the first Alpha, when it was still in-order and 1.6 million transistors — and I will allow that it doesn’t break the mold too much. The Pentium was also in-order but at 3 million I think it’s too big.)

2. Distributed Operating Systems

In 1993 we had OSF/1 with DCE. This was not the best OS one can imagine, but it had qualities and capabilities that have in retrospect not been meaningfully eclipsed in the years since. A DCE installation had a real distributed filesystem, RPC, locking and time services, single-sign-on (Kerberos) and directory service. Stuff you still can’t get reliably in our modern cloud/k8s nightmare. One might argue that Windows NT also got there, but .. sure, fine, you can have that too! Windows NT also came out in 1993, running on R4000. And Plan 9 was released in 1992. So we really were firmly in the “stuff better than we were ever going to get” future.

3. Languages

In 1993 we had Modula 3, Sather and Dylan; but we had not yet been subjected to Java, PHP or JavaScript. The former are all safe, native-compiled and expressive. The latter are .. not. We should have stopped here, or taken a different path at least, but the web came along.

4. The Web Was Still Niche

1994 was the year of the first WWW conference, the founding of the W3C, the year Netscape was released .. it was the year “everyone got the web”. I believe this was a mistake, and we all would have been better off doing something else instead. So 1993 it is. Gopher existed then too, along with IRC, FTP, NNTP and WAIS; things were fine.