Indeed. I am reminded of what Alan Kay has repeatedly referred to as a “pop culture” of computing that has become widespread in technical communities since the 1980s, when the spread of technology grew faster than educational efforts. One result is there are many inventions and innovations from the research community that never got adopted by major players. The corollary to “perfect is the enemy of the good” is good-enough solutions have amazingly long lifetimes in the marketplace.

There are many great ideas in operating systems, programming languages, and other systems that have been developed in the fast 30 years, but these ideas need to work with existing infrastructure due to costs, network effects, and other important factors.

What is interesting is how some of these features do get picked up by the mainstream computing ecosystem. Rust is one of the biggest breakthroughs in systems programming in decades, bringing together research in linear types and memory safety in a form that has resonated with a lot of systems programmers who tend to resist typical languages from the PL community. Some ideas from Plan 9, such as 9P, have made their way into contemporary systems. Features that were once the domain of Lisp have made their ways into contemporary programming languages, such as anonymous functions.

I think it would be cool if there were some book or blog that taught “alternate universe computing”: the ideas of research systems during the past few decades that didn’t become dominant but have very important lessons that people working on today’s systems can apply. A lot of what I know about research systems comes from graduate school, working in research environments, and reading sites like Hacker News. It would be cool if this information were more widely disseminated.