Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog

This has been going on for years, but a recent upgrade brought it to my attention and it rather says everything about what is wrong with the way technology is supposedly improved. If you define a style for your Web pages using a monospaced font like Courier, Firefox still decides to convert letter pairs like “fi” and “fl” to ligatures. In other words, it squashes the two letters together into a single character.

Now, I suppose that it does this in such a way that the resulting ligature only occupies the space of a single character, thereby not introducing proportional spacing that would disrupt the alignment of characters across lines, but it does manage to disrupt the distribution of characters and potentially the correspondence of characters between lines. Worst of all, though, this enforced conversion is just ugly.

Here is what WordPress seems to format without suffering from this problem, by explicitly using the “monospace” font-style identifier:

long client_flush(file_t *file);

And here is what happens when Courier is chosen as the font:

long client_flush(file_t *file);

In case theming, browser behaviour, and other factors obscure the effect I am attempting to illustrate, here it is with the ligatures deliberately introduced:

long client_flush(file_t *file);

In fact, the automatic ligatures do remain as two distinct letters crammed into a single space whereas I had to go and find the actual ligatures in LibreOffice’s “special character” dialogue to paste into the example above. One might argue that by keeping the letters distinct, it preserves the original text so that it can be copied and pasted back into a suitable environment, like a program source file or an interactive prompt or shell. But still, when the effect being sought is not entirely obtained, why is anyone actually bothering to do this?

It seems to me that this is yet another example of “design” indoctrination courtesy of the products of companies like Apple and Adobe, combined with the aesthetics-is-everything mentality that values style over substance. How awful it is that someone may put the letter “f” next to the letter “i” or “l” without pulling them closer together and using stylish typographic constructs!

Naturally, someone may jump to the defence of the practice being described here, claiming that what is really happening is kerning, as if someone like me might not have heard of it. Unfortunately for them, I spent quite a bit of time in the early 1990s – quite possibly before some of today’s “design” gurus were born – learning about desktop publishing and typography (for a system that had a coherent outline font system before platforms like the Macintosh and Windows did). Generally, you don’t tend to apply kerning to monospaced fonts like Courier: the big hint is the “monospaced” bit.

Apparently, the reason for this behaviour is something to do with the font library being used and it will apparently be fixed in future Firefox releases, or at least ones later than the one I happen to be using in Debian. Workarounds using configuration files reminiscent of the early 2000s Linux desktop experience apparently exist, although I don’t think they really work.

But anyway, well done to everyone responsible for this mess, whether it was someone’s great typographic “design” vision being imposed on everyone else, or whether it was just that yet more technologies were thrown into the big cauldron and stirred around without any consideration of the consequences. I am sure yet more ingredients will be thrown in to mask the unpleasant taste, also conspiring to make all our computers run more slowly.

Sometimes I think that “modern Web” platform architects have it as their overriding goal to reproduce the publishing solutions of twenty to thirty years ago using hardware hundreds or even thousands of times more powerful, yet delivering something that runs even slower and still producing comparatively mediocre results. As if the aim is to deliver something akin to a turn-of-the-century Condé Nast publication on the Web with gigabytes of JavaScript.

But maybe, at least for the annoyance described here, the lesson is that if something is barely worth doing, largely because it is probably only addressing someone’s offended sense of aesthetics, maybe just don’t bother doing it. There are, after all, plenty of other things in the realm of technology and beyond that more legitimately demand humanity’s attention.

Not much to report, really. Plenty of ongoing effort to overhaul my L4Re-based software support for the MIPS-based Ingenic SoC products, plus the slow resumption of some kind of focus on my more general framework to provide a demand-paged system on top of L4Re. And then various distractions and obligations on top of that.

Anyway, here is a picture of some kind of result:

The MIPS Creator CI20 driving the Pirate Audio Mini Speaker board’s screen.

It shows the MIPS Creator CI20 using a Raspberry Pi “hat”, driving the screen using the SPI peripheral built into the CI20’s JZ4780 SoC. Although the original Raspberry Pi had a 26-pin expansion header that the CI20 adopted for compatibility, the Pi range then adopted a 40-pin header instead. Hopefully, there weren’t too many unhappy vendors of accessories as a result of this change.

What it means for the CI20 is that its primary expansion header cannot satisfy the requirements of the expansion connector provided by this “hat” or board in its entirety. Instead, 14 pins of the board’s connector are left unconnected, with the board hanging over the side of the CI20 if mounted directly. Another issue is that the pinout of the board employs a pin as a data/command pin instead of as its designated function as a SPI data input pin. Whether the Raspberry Pi can configure itself to utilise this pin efficiently in this way might help to explain the configuration, but it isn’t compatible with the way such pins are assigned on the CI20.

Fortunately, the CI20’s designers exposed a SPI peripheral via a secondary header, including a dedicated data/command pin, meaning that a few jumper wires can connect the relevant pins to the appropriate connector pins. After some tedious device driver implementation and accompanying frustration, the screen could be persuaded to show an image. With the SPI peripheral being used instead of “bit banging”, or driving the data transfer to the screen controller directly in software, it became possible to use DMA to have the screen image repeatedly sent. And with that, the screen can be used to continuously reflect the contents of a generic framebuffer, becoming like a tiny monitor.

The board also has a speaker that can be driven using I2S communication. The CI20 doesn’t expose I2S signals via the header pins, instead routing I2S audio via the HDMI connector, analogue audio via the headphone socket, and PCM audio via the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip, presumably supporting Bluetooth audio. Fortunately, I have another means of testing the speaker, so I didn’t waste half of my money buying this board!

Towards the end of last year, I spent a fair amount of time trying to tidy up and document the work I had been doing on integrating a conventional filesystem into the L4 Runtime Environment (or L4Re Operating System Framework, as it now seems to be called). Some of that effort was purely administrative, such as giving the work a more meaningful name and changing references to the naming in various places, whereas other aspects were concerned with documenting mundane things like how the software might be obtained, built and used. My focus had shifted somewhat towards sharing the work and making it slightly more accessible to anyone who might be interested (even if this is probably a very small audience).

Previously, in seeking to demonstrate various mechanisms such as the way programs might be loaded and run, with their payloads paged into memory on demand, I had deferred other work that I felt was needed to make the software framework more usable. For example, I was not entirely happy with the way that my “client” library for filesystem access hid the underlying errors, making troubleshooting less convenient than it could be. Instead of perpetuating the classic Unix “errno” practice, I decided to give file data structures their own error member to retain any underlying error, meaning that a global variable would not be involved in any error reporting.

Other matters needed attending to, as well. Since acquiring a new computer in 2020 based on the x86-64 architecture, the primary testing environment for this effort has been a KVM/QEMU instance invoked by the L4Re build process. When employing the same x86-64 architecture for the instance as the host system, the instance should in theory be very efficient, but for some reason the startup time of such x86-64 instances is currently rather long. This was not the case at some point in the past, but having adopted the Git-based L4Re distribution, this performance regression made an appearance. Maybe at some stage in the future I will discover why it sits there for half a minute spinning up at the “Booting ROM” stage, but for now a reasonable workaround is to favour QEMU instances for other architectures when testing my development efforts.

Preserving Portability

Having long been aware of the necessity of software portability, I have therefore been testing the software in QEMU instances emulating the classic 32-bit x86 architecture as well as MIPS32, in which I have had a personal interest for several years. Surprisingly, testing on x86 revealed a few failures that were not easily explained, but I eventually tracked them down to interoperability problems with the L4Re IPC library, where that library was leaving parts of IPC message values uninitialised and causing my own IPC library to misinterpret the values being sent. This investigation also led me to discover that the x86 Application Binary Interface is rather different in character to the ABI for other architectures. On those other architectures, the alignment of members in structures (and of parameters in parameter lists) needs to be done more carefully due to the way values in memory are accessed. On x86, meanwhile, it seems that values of different sizes can be more readily packed together.

In any case, I came to believe that the L4Re IPC library is not following the x86 ABI specification in the way IPC messages are prepared. I did wonder whether this was deliberate, but I think that it is actually inadvertent. One of my helpful correspondents confirmed that there was indeed a discrepancy between the L4Re code and the ABI, but nothing came of any enquiries into the matter, so I imagine that in any L4Re systems deployed on x86 (although I doubt that there can be many), the use of the L4Re code on both sides of any given IPC transaction manages to conceal this apparent deficiency. The consequence for me was that I had to introduce a workaround in the cases where my code needs to interact with various existing L4Re components.

Several other portability changes were made to resolve a degree of ambiguity around the sizes of various types. This is where the C language family and various related standards and technologies can be infuriating, with care required when choosing data types and then using these in conjunction with libraries that might have their own ideas about which types should be used. Although there probably are good reasons for some types to be equivalent to a “machine word” in size, such types sit uncomfortably with types of other, machine-independent sizes. I am sure I will have to revisit these choices over and over again in future.

Enhancing Component Interface Descriptions

One thing I had been meaning to return to was the matter of my interface description language (IDL) tool and its lack of support for composing interfaces. For example, a component providing file content might expose several different interfaces for file operations, dataspace operations, and so on. These compound interfaces had been defined by specifying arguments for each invocation of the IDL tool that indicate all the interfaces involved, and thus the knowledge of each compound interface ended up being encoded as definitions within Makefiles like this:

mapped_file_object_INTERFACES = dataspace file flush mapped_file notification

A more natural approach involved defining these interfaces in the interface description language itself, but this was going to require putting in the effort to extend the tool, which would not be particularly pleasant, being written in C using Flex and Bison.

Eventually, I decided to just get on with remedying the situation, adding the necessary tool support, and thus tidying up and simplifying the Makefiles in my L4Re build system package. This did raise the complexity level in the special Makefiles provided to support the IDL tool – nothing in the realm of Makefiles is ever truly easy – but it hopefully confines such complexity out of sight and keeps the main project Makefiles as concise as can reasonably be expected. For reference, here is how a file component interface looks with this new tool support added:

interface MappedFileObject composes Dataspace, File, Flush, MappedFile, Notification;

And for reference, here is what one of the constituent interfaces looks like:

interface Flush
{
  /* Flush data and update the size, if appropriate. */

  [opcode(5)] void flush(in offset_t populated_size, out offset_t size);
};

I decided to diverge from previous languages of this kind and to use “composes” instead of language like “inherits”. These compound interface descriptions deliberately do not seek to combine interfaces in a way that entirely resembles inheritance as supported by various commonly used programming languages, and an interface composing other interfaces cannot also add operations of its own: it can merely combine other interfaces. The main reason for such limitations is the deliberate simplicity or lack of capability of the tool: it only really transcribes the input descriptions to equivalent forms in C or C++ and neglects to impose many restrictions of its own. One day, maybe I will revisit this and at least formalise these limitations instead of allowing them to emerge from the current state of the implementation.

A New Year

I had hoped to deliver something for broader perusal late last year, but the end of the year arrived and with it some intriguing but increasingly time-consuming distractions. Having written up the effective conclusion of those efforts, I was able to turn my attention to this work again. To start with, that involved reminding myself where I had got to with it, which underscores the need for some level of documentation, because documentation not only communicates the nature of a work to others but it also communicates it to one’s future self. So, I had to spend some time rediscovering the finer detail and reminding myself what the next steps were meant to be.

My previous efforts had demonstrated the ability to launch new programs from my own programs, reproducing some of what L4Re already provides but in a form more amenable to integrating with my own framework. If the existing L4Re code had been more obviously adaptable in a number of different ways throughout my long process of investigation and development for it, I might have been able to take some significant shortcuts and save myself a lot of effort. I suppose, however, that I am somewhat wiser about the technologies and techniques involved, which might be beneficial in its own way. The next step, then, was to figure out how to detect and handle the termination of programs that I had managed to launch.

In the existing L4Re framework, a component called Ned is capable of launching programs, although not being able to see quite how I might use it for my own purposes – that being to provide a capable enough shell environment for testing – had led me along my current path of development. It so happens that Ned supports an interface for “parent” tasks that is used by created or “child” tasks, and when a program terminates, the general support code for the program that is brought along by the C library includes the invocation of an operation on this parent interface before the program goes into a “wait forever” state. Handling this operation and providing this interface seemed to be the most suitable approach for replicating this functionality in my own code.

Consolidation and Modularisation

Before going any further, I wanted to consolidate my existing work which had demonstrated program launching in a program written specifically for that purpose, bringing along some accompanying abstractions that were more general in nature. First of all, I decided to try and make a library from the logic of the demonstration program I had written, so that the work involved in setting up the environment and resources for a new program could be packaged up and re-used. I also wanted the functionality to be available through a separate server component, so that programs wanting to start other programs would not need to incorporate this functionality but could instead make a request to this separate “process server” component to do the work, obtaining a reference to the new program in response.

One might wonder why one might bother introducing a separate component to start programs on another program’s behalf. As always when considering the division of functionality between components in a microkernel-based system, it is important to remember that components can have different configurations that afford them different levels of privilege within a system. We might want to start programs with one level of privilege from other programs with a different level of privilege. Another benefit of localising program launching in one particular component is that it might provide an overview of such activities across a number of programs, thus facilitating support for things like job and process control.

Naturally, an operating system does not need to consolidate all knowledge about running programs or processes in one place, and in a modular microkernel-based system, there need not even be a single process server. In fact, it seems likely that if we preserve the notion of a user of the system, each user might have their own process server, and maybe even more than one of them. Such a server would be configured to launch new programs in a particular way, having access only to resources available to a particular user. One interesting possibility is that of being able to run programs provided by one filesystem that then operate on data provided by another filesystem. A program would not be able to see the filesystem from which it came, but it would be able to see the contents of a separate, designated filesystem.

Region Mapper Deficiencies

A few things conspired to make the path of progress rather less direct than it might have been. Having demonstrated the launching of trivial programs, I had decided to take a welcome break from the effort. Returning to the effort, I decided to test access to files served up by my filesystem infrastructure, and this caused programs to fail. In order to support notification events when accessing files, I employ a notification thread to receive such events from other components, but the initialisation of threading in the C library was failing. This turned out to be due to the use of a region mapper operation that I had not yet supported, so I had to undertake a detour to implement an appropriate data structure in the region mapper, which in C++ is not a particularly pleasant experience.

Later on, the region mapper caused me some other problems. I had neglected to implement the detach operation, which I rely on quite heavily for my file access library. Attempting to remedy these problems involved reacquainting myself with the region mapper interface description which is buried in one of the L4Re packages, not to be confused with plenty of other region mapper abstractions which do not describe the actual interface employed by the IPC mechanism. The way that L4Re has abandoned properly documented interface descriptions is very annoying, requiring developers to sift through pages of barely commented code and to be fully aware of the role of that code. I implemented something that seemed to work, quite sure that I still did not have all the details correct in my implementation, and this suspicion would prove correct later on.

Local and Non-Local Capabilities

Another thing that I had not fully understood, when trying to put together a library handling IPC that I could tolerate working with, was the way that capabilities may be transferred in IPC messages within tasks. Capabilities are references to components in the system, and when transferred between tasks, the receiving task is meant to allocate a “slot” for each received capability. By choosing a slot denoted by an index, the task (or the program running in it) can tell the kernel where to record the capability in its own registry for the task, and by employing this index in its own registry, the program will be able to maintain a record of available capabilities consistent with that of the kernel.

The practice of allocating capability slots for received capabilities is necessary for transfers between tasks, but when the transfer occurs within a task, there is no need to allocate a new slot: the received capability is already recorded within the task, and so the item describing the capability in the message will actually encode the capability index known to the task. Previously, I was not generally sending capabilities in messages within tasks, and so I had not knowingly encountered any issues with my simplistic “general case” support for capability transfers, but having implemented a region mapper that resides in the same task as a program being run, it became necessary to handle the capabilities presented to the region mapper from within the same task.

One counterintuitive consequence of the capability management scheme arises from the general, inter-task transfer case. When a task receives a capability from another task, it will assign a new index to the capability ahead of time, since the kernel needs to process this transfer as it propagates the message. This leaves the task with a new capability without any apparent notion of whether it has seen that capability before. Maybe there is a way of asking the kernel if two capabilities refer to the same object, but it might be worthwhile just not relying on such facilities and designing frameworks around such restrictions instead.

Starting and Stopping

So, back to the exercise of stopping programs that I had been able to start! It turned out that receiving the notification that a program had finished was only the start; what then needed to happen was something of a mystery. Intuitively, I knew that the task hosting the program’s threads would need to be discarded, but I envisaged that the threads themselves probably needed to be discarded first, since they are assigned to the task and probably cannot have that task removed from under them, even if they are suspended in some sense.

But what about everything else referenced by the task? After all, the task will have capabilities for things like dataspaces that provide access to regions of files and to the program stack, for things like the filesystem for opening other files, for semaphore and IRQ objects, and so on. I cannot honestly say that I have the definitive solution, and I could not easily find much in the way of existing guidance, so I decided in the end to just try and tidy all the resources up as best I could, hopefully doing enough to make it possible to release the task and have the kernel dispose of it. This entailed a fairly long endeavour that also encouraged me to evolve the way that the monitoring of the process termination is performed.

When the started program eventually reaches the end and sends a message to its “parent” component, that component needs to record any termination state communicated in the message so that it may be passed on to the program’s creator or initiator, and then it also needs to commence the work of wrapping up the program. Here, I decided on a distinct component separate from one responsible for any paging activities to act as the contact point for the creating or initiating program. When receiving a termination message or signal, this component disconnects the terminating program from its internal pager by freeing the capability, and this then causes the internal pager to terminate, itself sending a signal to its own parent.

One important aspect of starting and terminating processes is that of notifying the party that sought to start a process in the first place. For filesystem operations, I had already implemented support for certain notification events related to opening, modifying and closing files and pipes, with these being particularly important for pipes. I wanted to extend this support to processes so that it might be possible to monitor files, pipes and processes together using a kind of select or poll operation. This led to a substantial detour where I became dissatisfied with the existing support, modified it, had to debug it, and remain somewhat concerned that it might need more work in the future.

Testing on the different architectures under QEMU also revealed that I would need to handle the possibility that a program might be started and run to completion before its initiator had even received a reference to the program for notification purposes. Fortunately, a similar kind of vanishing resource problem arose when I was developing the file paging system, and so I had a technique available to communicate the reference to the process monitor component to the initiator of the program, ensuring that the process monitor becomes established in the kernel’s own records, before the program itself gets started, runs and completes, avoiding the process monitor being tidied up before its existence becomes known to the wider system.

Wrapping Up Again

A few concerns remain with the state of the work so far. I experienced problems with filesystem access that I traced to the activity of repeatedly attaching and detaching dataspaces, which is something my filesystem access library does deliberately, but the error suggested that the L4Re region mapper had somehow failed to attach the appropriate region. This may well be caused by issues within my own code, and my initial investigation did indeed uncover a problem in my own code where the size of the attached region of a file would gradually increase over time. With this mistake fixed, the situation was improved, but the underlying problem was not completely eliminated, judging from occasional errors. A workaround has been adopted for now.

Various other problems arose and were hopefully resolved. I would say that some of them were due to oversights when getting things done takes precedence over a more complete consideration of all the issues, particularly when working in a language like C++ where lower-level chores like manual memory management enter the picture. The differing performance when emulating various architectures under QEMU also revealed a deficiency with my region mapper implementation. It turned out that detach operations were not returning successfully, leading the L4Re library function to return without invalidating memory pages, and so my file access operations were returning pages of incorrect content instead of the expected file content for the first few accesses until the correct pages had been paged in and were almost continuously resident.

Here, yet more digging around in the L4Re code revealed an apparent misunderstanding about the return value associated with one of the parameters to the detach operation, that of the detached dataspace. I had concluded that a genuine capability was meant to be returned, but it seems that a simple index value is returned in a message word instead of a message item, and so there is no actual capability transferred to the caller, not even a local one. The L4Re IPC framework does not really make the typing semantics very clear, or at least not to me, and the code involved is quite unfathomable. Again, a formal interface specification written in a clearly expressed language would have helped substantially.

Next Steps

I suppose progress of sorts has been made in the last month or so, for which I can be thankful. Although tidying up the detritus of my efforts will remain an ongoing task, I can now initiate programs and wait for them to finish, meaning that I can start building up test suites within the environment, combining programs with differing functionality in a Unix-like fashion to hopefully validate the behaviour of the underlying frameworks and mechanisms.

Now, I might have tried much of this with L4Re’s Lua-based scripting, but it is not as straightforward as a more familiar shell environment, appearing rather more low-level in some ways, and it is employed in a way that seems to favour parallel execution instead of the sequential execution that I might desire when composing tests: I want tests to involve programs whose results feed into subsequent programs, as opposed to just running a load of programs at once. Also, without more extensive documentation, the Lua-based scripting support remains a less attractive choice than just building something where I get to control the semantics. Besides, I also need to introduce things like interprocess pipes, standard input and output, and such things familiar from traditional software platforms. Doing that for a simple shell-like environment would be generally beneficial, anyway.

Should I continue to make progress, I would like to explore some of the possibilities hinted at above. The modular architecture of a microkernel-based system should allow a more flexible approach in partitioning the activities of different users, along with the configuration of their programs. These days, so much effort is spent in “orchestration” and the management of containers, with a veritable telephone directory of different technologies and solutions competing for the time and attention of developers who are now also obliged to do the work of deployment specialists and systems administrators. Arguably, much of that involves working around the constraints of traditional systems instead of adapting to those systems, with those systems themselves slowly adapting in not entirely convincing or satisfactory ways.

I also think back to my bachelor’s degree dissertation about mobile software agents where the idea was that untrusted code might be transmitted between systems to carry out work in a safe and harmless fashion. Reducing the execution environment of such agent programs to a minimum and providing decent support for monitoring and interacting with them would be something that might be more approachable using the techniques explored in this endeavour. Pervasive, high-speed, inexpensively-accessed networks undermined the envisaged use-cases for mobile agents in general, although the practice of issuing SQL queries to database servers or having your browser run JavaScript programs deployed in Web pages demonstrates that the general paradigm is far from obsolete.

In any case, my “to do” list for this project will undoubtedly remain worryingly long for the foreseeable future, but I will hopefully be able to remedy shortcomings, expand the scope and ambition of the effort, and continue to communicate my progress. Thank you to those who have made it to the end of this rather dry article!

Previously, I described exploring the matter of developing emulation of a serial port, along with the necessary circuitry, for Elkulator, an emulator for the Acorn Electron microcomputer, motivated by a need to provide a way of transferring files into and out of the emulated computer. During this exploration, I had discovered some existing software that had been developed to provide some level of serial “filing system” support on the BBC Microcomputer – the higher-specification sibling of the Electron – with the development of this software having been motivated by an unforeseen need to transfer software to a computer without any attached storage devices.

This existing serial filing system software was a good indication that serial communications could provide the basis of a storage medium. But instead of starting from a predicament involving computers without usable storage facilities, where an unforeseen need motivates the development of a clever workaround, I wanted to consider what such a system might have been like if there had been a deliberate plan from the very beginning to deploy computers that would rely on a serial connection for all their storage needs. Instead of having an implementation of the filing system in RAM, one could have the luxury of putting it into a ROM chip that would be fitted in the computer or in an expansion, and a richer set of features might then be contemplated.

A Smarter Terminal

Once again, my interest in the historical aspects of the technology provided some guidance and some inspiration. When microcomputers started to become popular and businesses and institutions had to decide whether these new products had any relevance to their operations, there was some uncertainty about whether such products were capable enough to be useful or whether they were a distraction from the facilities already available in such organisations. It seems like a lifetime ago now, but having a computer on every desk was not necessarily seen as a guarantee of enhanced productivity, particularly if they did not link up to existing facilities or did not coordinate the work of a number of individuals.

At the start of the 1980s, equipping an office with a computer on every desk and equipping every computer with a storage solution was an expensive exercise. Even disk drives offering only a hundred kilobytes of storage on each removable floppy disk were expensive, and hard disk drives were an especially expensive and precious luxury that were best shared between many users. Some microcomputers were marketed as multi-user systems, encouraging purchasers to connect terminals to them and to share those precious resources: precisely the kind of thing that had been done with minicomputers and mainframes. Such trends continued into the mid-1980s, manifested by products promoted by companies with mainframe origins, such companies perpetuating entrenched tendencies to frame computing solutions in certain ways.

Terminals themselves were really just microcomputers designed for the sole purpose of interacting with a “host” computer, and institutions already operating mainframes and minicomputers would have experienced the need to purchase several of them. Until competition intensified in the terminal industry, such products were not particularly cheap, with the DEC VT220 introduced in 1983 costing $1295 at its introduction. Meanwhile, interest in microcomputers and the possibility of distributing some kinds of computing activity to these new products, led to experimentation in some organisations. Some terminal manufacturers responded by offering terminals that also ran microcomputer software.

Much of the popular history of microcomputing, familiar to anyone who follows such topics online, particularly through YouTube videos, focuses on adoption of such technology in the home, with an inevitable near-obsession with gaming. The popular history of institutional adoption often focuses on the upgrade parade from one generation of computer to the next. But there is a lesser told history involving the experimentation that took place at the intersection of microcomputing and minicomputing or mainframe computing. In universities, computers like the BBC Micro were apparently informally introduced as terminals for other systems, terminal ROMs were developed and shared between institutions. However, there seems to have been relatively little mainstream interest in such software as fully promoted commercial products, although Acornsoft – Acorn’s software outlet – did adopt such a ROM to sell as their Termulator product.

The Acorn Electron, introduced at £199, had a “proper” keyboard and the ability to display 80 columns of text, unlike various other popular microcomputers. Indeed, it may have been the lowest-priced computer to be able to display 80 columns of relatively high definition text as standard, such capabilities requiring extra cards for machines like the Apple II and the Commodore 64. Considering the much lower price of such a computer, the ongoing experimentation underway at the time with its sibling machine on alternative terminal solutions, and the generally favourable capabilities of both these machines, it seems slightly baffling that more was not done to pursue opportunities to introduce a form of “intelligent terminal” or “hybrid terminal” product to certain markets.

VIEW in 80 columns on the Acorn Electron.

None of this is to say that institutional users would have been especially enthusiastic. In some institutions, budgets were evidently generous enough that considerable sums of money would be spent acquiring workstations that were sometimes of questionable value. But in others, the opportunity to make savings, to explore other ways of working, and perhaps also to explicitly introduce microcomputing topics such as software development for lower-specification hardware would have been worthy of some consideration. An Electron with a decent monochrome monitor, like the one provided with the M2105, plus some serial hardware, could have comprised a product sold for perhaps as little as £300.

The Hybrid Terminal

How would a “hybrid terminal” solution work, how might it have been adopted, and what might it have been used for? Through emulation and by taking advantage of the technological continuity in multi-user systems from the 1980s to the present day, we can attempt to answer such questions. Starting with communications technologies familiar in the world of the terminal, we might speculate that a serial connection would be the most appropriate and least disruptive way of interfacing a microcomputer to a multi-user system.

Although multi-user systems, like those produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), might have offered network connectivity, it is likely that such connectivity was proprietary, expensive in terms of the hardware required, and possibly beyond the interfacing capabilities of most microcomputers. Meanwhile, Acorn’s own low-cost networking solution, Econet, would not have been directly compatible with these much higher-end machines. Acorn’s involvement in network technologies is also more complicated than often portrayed, but as far as Econet is concerned, only much later machines would more conveniently bridge the different realms of Econet and standards-based higher-performance networks.

Moreover, it remains unlikely that operators and suppliers of various multi-user systems would have been enthusiastic about fitting dedicated hardware and installing dedicated software for the purpose of having such systems communicate with third-party computers using a third-party network technology. I did find it interesting that someone had also adapted Acorn’s network filing system that usually runs over Econet to work instead over a serial connection, which presumably serves files out of a particular user account. Another discovery I made was a serial filing system approach by someone who had worked at Acorn who wanted to transfer files between a BBC Micro system and a Unix machine, confirming that such functionality was worth pursuing. (And there is also a rather more complicated approach involving more exotic Acorn technology.)

Indeed, to be successful, a hybrid terminal approach would have to accommodate existing practices and conventions as far as might be feasible in order to not burden or disturb the operators of these existing systems. One motivation from an individual user’s perspective might be to justify introducing a computer on their desk, to be able to have it take advantage of the existing facilities, and to augment those facilities where it might be felt that they are not flexible or agile enough. Such users might request help from the operators, but the aim would be to avoid introducing more support hassles, which would easily arise if introducing a new kind of network to the mix. Those operators would want to be able to deploy something and have it perform a role without too much extra thought.

I considered how a serial link solution might achieve this. An existing terminal would be connected to, say, a Unix machine and be expected to behave like a normal client, allowing the user to log into their account. The microcomputer would send some characters down the serial line to the Unix “host”, causing it to present the usual login prompt, and the user would then log in as normal. They would then have the option of conducting an interactive session, making their computer like a conventional terminal, but there would also be the option of having the Unix system sit in the background, providing other facilities on request.

Logging into a remote service via a serial connection.

The principal candidates for these other facilities would be file storage and printing. Both of these things were centrally managed in institutions, often available via the main computing service, and the extensible operating system of the Electron and related microcomputers invites the development of software to integrate the core support for these facilities with such existing infrastructure. Files would be loaded from the user’s account on the multi-user system and saved back there again. Printing would spool the printed data to files somewhere in the user’s home directory for queuing to centralised printing services.

Attempting an Implementation

I wanted to see how such a “serial computing environment” would work in practice, how it would behave, what kinds of applications might benefit, and what kind of annoyances it might have. After all, it might be an interesting idea or a fun idea, but it need not be a particularly good one. The first obstacle was that of understanding how the software elements would work, primarily on the Electron itself, from the tasks that I would want the software to perform down to the way the functionality would be implemented. On the host or remote system, I was rather more convinced that something could be implemented since it would mostly be yet another server program communicating over a stream, with plenty of modern Unix conveniences to assist me along the way.

As it turned out, my investigations began with a trip away from home and the use of a different, and much more constrained, development environment involving an ARM-based netbook. Fortunately, Elkulator and the different compilers and tools worked well enough on that development hardware to make the exercise approachable. Another unusual element was that I was going to mostly rely on the original documentation in the form of the actual paper version of the Acorn Electron Advanced User Guide for information on how to write the software for the Electron. It was enlightening coming back to this book after a few decades for assistance on a specific exercise, even though I have perused the book many times in its revised forms online, because returning to it with a focus on a particular task led me to find that the documentation in the book was often vague or incomplete.

Although the authors were working in a different era and presumably under a degree of time pressure, I feel that the book in some ways exhibits various traits familiar to those of us working in the software industry, these indicating a lack of rigour and of sufficient investment in systems documentation. For this, I mostly blame the company who commissioned the work and then presumably handed over some notes and told the authors to fill in the gaps. As if to strengthen such perceptions of hurriedness and lack of review, it also does not help that “system” is mis-spelled “sysem” in a number of places in the book!

Nevertheless, certain aspects of the book were helpful. The examples, although focusing on one particular use-case, did provide helpful detail in deducing the correct way of using certain mechanisms, even if they elected to avoid the correct way of performing other tasks. Acorn’s documentation had a habit of being “preachy” about proper practices, only to see its closest developers ignore those practices, anyway. Eventually, on returning from my time away, I was able to fill in some of the gaps, although by this time I had a working prototype that was able to do basic things like initiate a session on the host system and to perform some file-related operations.

There were, and still are, a lot of things that needed, and still need, improvement with my implementation. The way that the operating system needs to be extended to provide extra filing system functionality involves plenty of programming interfaces, plenty of things to support, and also plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong. The VIEW word processor makes use of interfaces for both whole-file loading and saving as well as random-access file operations. Missing out support for one or the other will probably not yield the desired level of functionality.

There are also intricacies with regard to switching printing on and off – this typically being done using control characters sent through the output stream – and of “spool” files which capture character output. And filing system ROMs need to be initialised through a series of “service calls”, these being largely documented, but the overall mechanism is left largely undescribed in the documentation. It is difficult enough deciphering the behaviour of the Electron’s operating system today, with all the online guidance available in many forms, so I cannot imagine how difficult it would have been as a third party to effectively develop applications back in the day.

Levels of Simulation

To support the activities of the ROM software in the emulated Electron, I had to develop a server program running on my host computer. As noted above, this was not onerous, especially since I had already written a program to exercise the serial communications and to interact with the emulated serial port. I developed this program further to respond to commands issued by my ROM, performing host operations and returning results. For example, the CAT command produces a “catalogue” of files in a host directory, and so my server program performs a directory listing operation, collects the names of the files, and then sends them over the virtual serial link to the ROM for it to display to the user.

To make the experience somewhat authentic and to approximate to an actual deployment environment, I included a simulation of the login prompt so that the user of the emulated Electron would have to log in first, with the software also having to deal with a logged out (or not yet logged in) condition in a fairly graceful way. To ensure that they are logged in, a user selects the Serial Computing Environment using the *SCE command, this explicitly selecting the serial filing system, and the login dialogue is then presented if the user has not yet logged into the remote host. Once logged in, the ROM software should be able to test for the presence of the command processor that responds to issued commands, only issuing commands if the command processor has signalled its presence.

Although this models a likely deployment environment, I wanted to go a bit further in terms of authenticity, and so I decided to make the command processor a separate program that would be installed in a user account on a Unix machine. The user’s profile script would be set up to run the command processor, so that when they logged in, this program would automatically run and be ready for commands. I was first introduced to such practices in my first workplace where a menu-driven, curses-based program I had written was deployed so that people doing first-line technical support could query the database of an administrative system without needing to be comfortable with the Unix shell environment.

For complete authenticity I would actually want to have the emulated Electron contact a Unix-based system over a physical serial connection, but for now I have settled for an arrangement whereby a pseudoterminal is created to run the login program, with the terminal output presented to the emulator. Instead of seeing a simulated login dialogue, the user now interacts with the host system’s login program, allowing them to log into a real account. At that point, the command processor is invoked by the shell and the user gets back control.

Obtaining a genuine login dialogue from a Unix system.

To prevent problems with certain characters, the command processor configures the terminal to operate in raw mode. Apart from that, it operates mostly as it did when run together with the login simulation which did not have to concern itself with such things as terminals and login programs.

Some Applications

This effort was motivated by the need or desire to be able to access files from within Elkulator, particularly from applications such as VIEW. Naturally, VIEW is really just one example from the many applications available for the Electron, but since it interacts with a range of functionality that this serial computing environment provides, it serves to showcase such functionality fairly well. Indeed, some of the screenshots featured in this and the previous article show VIEW operating on text that was saved and loaded over the serial connection.

Accessing files involves some existing operating system commands, such as *CAT (often abbreviated to *.) to list the catalogue of a storage medium. Since a Unix host supports hierarchical storage, whereas the Electron’s built-in command set only really addresses the needs of a flat storage medium (as provided by various floppy disk filing systems for Electron and BBC Micro), the *DIR command has been introduced from Acorn’s hierarchical filing systems (such as ADFS) to navigate between directories, which is perhaps confusing to anyone familiar with other operating systems, such as the different variants of DOS and their successors.

Using catalogue and directory traversal commands.

VIEW allows documents to be loaded and saved in a number of ways, but as a word processor it also needs to be able to print these documents. This might be done using a printer connected to a parallel port, but it makes a bit more sense to instead allow the serial printer to be selected and for printing to occur over the serial connection. However, it is not sufficient to merely allow the operating system to take over the serial link and to send the printed document, if only because the other side of this link is not a printer! Indeed, the command processor is likely to be waiting for commands and to see the incoming data as ill-formed input.

The chosen solution was to intercept attempts to send characters to a serial printer, buffering them and then sending the buffered data in special commands to the command processor. This in turn would write the printed characters to a “spool” file for each printing session. From there, these files could be sent to an appropriate printer. This would give the user rather more control over printing, allowing them to process the printout with Unix tools, or to select one particular physical printer out of the many potentially available in an organisation. In the VIEW environment, and in the MOS environment generally, there is no built-in list of printers or printer selection dialogue.

Since the kinds of printers anticipated for use with VIEW might well have been rather different from the kinds connected to multi-user systems, it is likely that some processing would be desirable where different text styles and fonts have been employed. Today, projects like PrinterToPDF exist to work with old-style printouts, but it is conceivable that either the “printer driver generator” in the View suite or some postprocessing tool might have been used to produce directly printable output. With unstyled text, however, the printouts are generally readable and usable, as the following excerpt illustrates.

               A  brief report on the experience
               of using VIEW as a word processor
               four decades on.

Using VIEW on the Acorn  Electron  is  an  interesting  experience  and  a
glimpse  into  the  way  word  processing  was  once done. Although I am a
dedicated user of Vim, I am under no  illusions  of  that  program's  word
processing  capabilities: it is deliberately a screen editor based on line
editor  heritage,  and  much  of  its  operations  are  line-oriented.  In
contrast, VIEW is intended to provide printed output: it presents the user
with a  ruler  showing  the  page margins and tab stops, and it even saves
additional   rulers   into  the  stored  document   in   their   on-screen
representations. Together with its default typewriter-style  behaviour  of
allowing  the  cursor  to  be moved into empty space and of overwriting or
replacing text, there is a quaint feel to it.

Since VIEW is purely text-based, I can easily imagine converting its formatting codes to work with troff. That would then broaden the output options. Interestingly, the Advanced User Guide was written in VIEW and then sent to a company for typesetting, so perhaps a workflow like this would have been useful for the authors back then.

A major selling point of the Electron was its provision of BBC BASIC as the built-in language. As the BBC Micro had started to become relatively widely adopted in schools across the United Kingdom, a less expensive computer offering this particular dialect of BASIC was attractive to purchasers looking for compatibility with school computers at home. Obviously, there is a need to be able to load and save BASIC programs, and this can be done using the serial connection.

Loading a BASIC program from the Unix host.

Beyond straightforward operations like these, BASIC also provides random-access file operations through various keywords and constructs, utilising the underlying operating system interfaces that invoke filing system operations to perform such work. VIEW also appears to use these operations, so it seems sensible not to ignore them, even if many programmers might have preferred to use bulk transfer operations – the standard load and save – to get data in and out of memory quickly.

A BASIC program reading and showing a file.

Interactions between printing, the operating system’s own spooling support, outputting characters and reading and writing data are tricky. A degree of experimentation was required to make these things work together. In principle, it should be possible to print and spool at the same time, even with output generated by the remote host that has been sent over the serial line for display on the Electron!

Of course, as a hybrid terminal, the exercise would not be complete without terminal functionality. Here, I wanted to avoid going down another rabbit hole and implementing a full terminal emulator, but I still wanted to demonstrate the invocation of a shell on the Unix host and the ability to run commands. To show just another shell session transcript would be rather dull, so here I present the perusal of a Python program to generate control codes that change the text colour on the Electron, along with the program’s effects:

Interaction with the shell featuring multiple text colours.

As a bitmapped terminal, the Electron is capable of much more than this. Although limited to moderate resolutions by the standards of the fanciest graphics terminals even of that era, there are interesting possibilities for Unix programs and scripts to generate graphical output.

A chart generated by a Python program showing workstation performance results.

Sending arbitrary character codes requires a bit of terminal configuration magic so that line feeds do not get translated into other things (the termios manual page is helpful, here, suggesting the ONLCR flag as the culprit), but the challenge, as always, is to discover the piece of the stack of technologies that is working against you. Similar things can be said on the Electron as well, with its own awkward confluence of character codes for output and output control, requiring the character output state to be tracked so that certain values do not get misinterpreted in the wrong context.

Others have investigated terminal connectivity on Acorn’s 8-bit microcomputers and demonstrated other interesting ways of producing graphical output from Unix programs. Acornsoft’s Termulator could even emulate a Tektronix 4010 graphical terminal. Curiously, Termulator also supported file transfer between a BBC Micro and the host machine, although only as a dedicated mode and limited to ASCII-only text files, leaving the hybrid terminal concept unexplored.

Reflections and Remarks

I embarked on this exercise with some cautiousness, knowing that plenty of uncertainties lay ahead in implementing a functional piece of software, and there were plenty of frustrating moments as some of the different elements of the rather underdocumented software stack conspired to produce undesirable behaviour. In addition, the behaviour of my serial emulation code had a confounding influence, requiring some low-level debugging (tracing execution within the emulator instruction by instruction, noting the state of the emulated CPU), some slowly dawning realisations, and some adjustments to hopefully make it work in a more cooperative fashion.

There are several areas of potential improvement. I first programmed in 6502 assembly language maybe thirty-five years ago, and although I managed to get some sprite and scrolling routines working, I never wrote any large programs, nor had to interact with the operating system frameworks. I personally find the 6502 primitive, rigid, and not particularly conducive to higher-level programming techniques, and I found myself writing some macros to take away the tedium of shuffling values between registers and the stack, constantly aware of various pitfalls with regard to corrupting registers.

My routines extending the operating system framework possibly do not do things the right way or misunderstand some details. That, I will blame on the vague documentation as well as any mistakes made micromanaging the registers. Particularly frustrating was the way that my ROM code would be called with interrupts disabled in certain cases. This made implementation challenging when my routines needed to communicate over the serial connection, when such communication itself requires interrupts to be enabled. Quite what the intention of the MOS designers was in such circumstances remains something of a mystery. While writing this article, I realised that I could have implemented the printing functionality in a different way, and this might have simplified things, right up to the point where I saw, thanks to the debugger provided by Elkulator, that the routines involved are called – surprise! – with interrupts disabled.

Performance could be a lot better, with this partly due to my own code undoubtedly requiring optimisation. The existing software stack is probably optimised to a reasonable extent, but there are various persistent background activities that probably steal CPU cycles unnecessarily. One unfortunate contributor to performance limitations is the hardware architecture of the Electron. Indeed, I discovered while testing in one of the 80-column display modes that serial transfers were not reliable at the default transfer rate of 9600 baud, instead needing to be slowed down to only 2400 baud. Some diagnosis confirmed that the software was not reading the data from the serial chip quickly enough, causing an overflow condition and data being lost.

Motivated by cost reduction and product positioning considerations – the desire to avoid introducing a product that might negatively affect BBC Micro sales – the Electron was deliberately designed to use a narrow data bus to fewer RAM chips than otherwise would have been used, with a seemingly clever technique being employed to allow the video circuitry to get the data at the desired rate to produce a high-resolution or high-bandwidth display. Unfortunately, the adoption of the narrow data bus, facilitated by the adoption of this particular technique, meant that the CPU could only ever access RAM at half its rated speed. And with the narrow data bus, the video circuitry effectively halts the CPU altogether for a substantial portion of its time in high-bandwidth display modes. Since serial communications handling relies on the delivery and handling of interrupts, if the CPU is effectively blocked from responding quickly enough, it can quickly fall behind if the data is arriving and the interrupts are occurring too often.

That does raise the issue of reliability and of error correction techniques. Admittedly, this work relies on a reliable connection between the emulated Electron and the host. Some measures are taken to improve the robustness of the communication when messages are interrupted so that the host in particular is not left trying to send or receive large volumes of data that are no longer welcome or available, and other measures are taken to prevent misinterpretation of stray data received in a different and thus inappropriate context. I imagine that I may have reinvented the wheel badly here, but these frustrations did provide a level of appreciation of the challenges involved.

Some Broader Thoughts

It is possible that Acorn, having engineered the Electron too aggressively for cost, made the machine less than ideal for the broader range of applications for which it was envisaged. That said, it should have been possible to revise the design and produce a more performant machine. Experiments suggest that a wider data path to RAM would have helped with the general performance of the Electron, but to avoid most of the interrupt handling problems experienced with the kind of application being demonstrated here, the video system would have needed to employ its existing “clever” memory access technique in conjunction with that wider data path so as to be able to share the bandwidth more readily with the CPU.

Contingency plans should have been made to change or upgrade the machine, if that had eventually been deemed necessary, starting at the point in time when the original design compromises were introduced. Such flexibility and forethought would also have made a product with a longer appeal to potential purchasers, as opposed to a product that risked being commercially viable for only a limited period of time. However, it seems that the lessons accompanying such reflections on strategy and product design were rarely learned by Acorn. If lessons were learned, they appear to have reinforced a particular mindset and design culture.

Virtue is often made of the Acorn design philosophy and the sometimes rudely expressed and dismissive views of competing technologies that led the company to develop the ARM processor. This approach enabled comparatively fast and low-cost systems to be delivered by introducing a powerful CPU to do everything in a system from running applications to servicing interrupts for data transfers, striving for maximal utilisation of the available memory bandwidth by keeping the CPU busy. That formula worked well enough at the low end of the market, but when the company tried to move upmarket once again, its products were unable to compete with those of other companies. Ultimately, this sealed the company’s fate, even if more fortuitous developments occurred to keep ARM in the running.

(In the chart shown earlier demonstating graphical terminal output and illustrating workstation performance, circa 1990, Acorn’s R260 workstation is depicted as almost looking competitive until one learns that the other workstations depicted arrived a year earlier and that the red bar showing floating-point performance only applies to Acorn’s machine three years after its launch. It would not be flattering to show the competitors at that point in history, nor would it necessarily be flattering to compare whole-system performance, either, if any publication sufficiently interested in such figures had bothered to do so. There is probably an interesting story to be told about these topics, particularly how Acorn’s floating-point hardware arrived so late, but I doubt that there is the same willingness to tell it as there is to re-tell the usual celebratory story of ARM for the nth time.)

Acorn went on to make the Communicator as a computer that would operate in a kind of network computing environment, relying on network file servers to provide persistent storage. It reused some of the technology in the Electron and the BT Merlin M2105, particularly the same display generator and its narrow data bus to RAM, but ostensibly confining that aspect of the Electron’s architecture to a specialised role, and providing other facilities for applications and, as in the M2105, for interaction with peripherals. Sadly, the group responsible in Acorn had already been marginalised and eventually departed, apparently looking to pursue the concept elsewhere.

As for this particular application of an old computer and a product that was largely left uncontemplated, I think there probably was some mileage in deploying microcomputers in this way, even outside companies like Acorn where such computers were being developed and used, together with software development companies with their own sophisticated needs, where minicomputers like the DEC VAX would have been available for certain corporate or technical functions. Public (or semi-public) access terminals were fairly common in universities, and later microcomputers were also adopted in academia due to their low cost and apparently sufficient capabilities.

Although such adoption appears to have focused on terminal applications, it cannot have been beyond the wit of those involved to consider closer integration between the microcomputing and multi-user environments. In further and higher education, students will have had microcomputing experience and would have been able to leverage their existing skills whilst learning new ones. They might have brought their microcomputers along with them, giving them the opportunity to transfer or migrate their existing content – their notes, essays, programs – to the bright and emerging new world of Unix, as well as updating their expertise.

As for updating my own expertise, it has been an enlightening experience in some ways, and I may well continue to augment the implemented functionality, fix and improve things, and investigate the possibilities this work brings. I hope that this rather lengthy presentation of the effort has provided insights into experiences of the past that was and the past that might have been.

In the last couple of years, possibly in common with quite a few other people, certainly people of my vintage, and undoubtedly those also interested in retrocomputing, I have found myself revisiting certain aspects of my technological past. Fortunately, sites like the Internet Archive make this very easy indeed, allowing us to dive into publications from earlier eras and to dredge up familiar and not so familiar magazine titles and other documentation. And having pursued my retrocomputing interest for a while, participating in forums, watching online videos, even contributing to new software and hardware developments, I have found myself wanting to review some of the beliefs and perceptions that I and other people have had of the companies and products we grew up with.

One of the products of personal interest to me is the computer that got me and my brother started with writing programs (as well as playing games): the Acorn Electron, a product of Acorn Computers of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Much can be said about the perceived chronology of this product’s development and introduction, the actual chronology, and its impact on its originator and on wider society, but that surely deserves a separate treatment. What I can say is that reviewing the archives and other knowledge available to us now can give a deeper understanding of the processes involved in the development of the Electron, the technological compromises made, and the corporate strategy that led to its creation and eventually its discontinuation.

The Acorn Electron
(Picture attribution: By Bilby – Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link)

It has been popular to tell simplistic narratives about Acorn Computers, to reduce its history to a few choice moments as the originator of the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM processor, but to do so is to neglect a richer and far more interesting story, even if the fallibility of some of the heroic and generally successful characters involved may be exposed by telling some of that story. And for those who wonder how differently some aspects of computing history might have turned out, exploring that story and the products involved can be an adventure in itself, filling in the gaps of our prior experiences with new insights, realisations and maybe even glimpses into opportunities missed and what might have been if things had played out differently.

At the Rabbit Hole

Reading about computing history is one thing, but this tale is about actually doing things with old software, emulation, and writing new software. It started off with a discussion about the keyboard shortcuts for a word processor and the differences between the keyboards on the Acorn Electron and its higher-specification predecessor, the BBC Microcomputer. Having acquainted myself with the circuitry of the Electron, how its keyboard is wired up, and how the software accesses it, I was obviously intrigued by these apparent differences, but I was also intrigued by the operation of the word processor in question, Acornsoft’s VIEW.

Back in the day, as people like to refer to the time when these products were first made available, such office or productivity applications were just beyond my experience. Although it was slightly fascinating to read about them, most of my productive time was spent writing programs, mostly trying to write games. I had actually seen an office suite written by Psion on the ACT Sirius 1 in the early 1980s, but word processors were the kind of thing that people used in offices or, at the very least, by people who had a printer so that they could print the inevitable letters that everyone would be needing to write.

Firing up an Acorn Electron emulator, specifically Elkulator, I discovered that one of the participants in the discussion was describing keyboard shortcuts that didn’t match up to those that were described in a magazine article from the era, these appearing correct as I tried them out for myself. It turned out that the discussion participant in question was using the BBC Micro version of VIEW on the Electron and was working around the mismatch in keyboard layouts. Although all of this was much ado about virtually nothing, it did two things. Firstly, it made me finally go in and fix Elkulator’s keyboard configuration dialogue, and secondly, it made me wonder how convenient it would be to explore old software in a productive way in an emulator.

Reconciling Keyboards

Having moved to Norway many years ago now, I use a Norwegian keyboard layout, and this has previously been slightly problematic when using emulators for older machines. Many years ago, I used and even contributed some minor things to another emulator, ElectrEm, which had a nice keyboard configuration dialogue. The Electron’s keyboard corresponds to certain modern keyboards pretty well, at least as far as the alphanumeric keys are concerned. More challenging are the symbols and control-related keys, in particular the Electron’s special Caps Lock/Function key which sits where many people now have their Tab key.

Obviously, there is a need to be able to tell an emulator which keys on a modern keyboard are going to correspond to the keys on the emulated machine. Being derived from an emulator for the BBC Micro, however, Elkulator’s keyboard configuration dialogue merely presented a BBC Micro keyboard on the screen and required the user to guess which “Beeb” key might correspond to an Electron one. Having put up with this situation for some time, I finally decided to fix this once and for all. The process of doing so is not particularly interesting, so I will spare you the details of doing things with the Allegro toolkit and the Elkulator source code, but I was mildly pleased with the result:

The revised keyboard configuration dialogue in Elkulator.

By also adding support for redefining the Break key in a sensible way, I was also finally able to choose a key that desktop environments don’t want to interfere with: F12 might work for Break, but Ctrl-F12 makes KDE/Plasma do something I don’t want, and yet Ctrl-Break is quite an important key combination when using an Electron or BBC Micro. Why Break isn’t a normal key on these machines is another story in itself, but here is an example of redefining it and even allowing multiple keys on a modern keyboard to act as Break on the emulated computer:

Redefining the Break key in Elkulator.

Being able to confidently choose and use keys made it possible to try out VIEW in a more natural way. But this then led to another issue: how might I experiment with such software productively? It would be good to write documents and to be able to extract them from the emulator, rather than see them disappear when the emulator is closed.

Real and Virtual Machines

One way to get text out of a system, whether it is a virtual system like the emulated Electron or a real machine, is to print it. I vaguely remembered some support for printing from Elkulator and was reminded by my brother that he had implemented such support himself a while ago as a quick way of getting data out of the emulated system. But I also wanted to be able to get data into the emulated system as well, and the parallel interface typically used by the printer is not bidirectional on the Electron. So, I would need to look further for a solution.

It is actually the case that Elkulator supports reading from and writing to disk (or disc) images. The unexpanded Electron supports read/write access to cassettes (or tapes), but Elkulator does not support writing to tapes, probably because the usability considerations are rather complicated: one would need to allow the user to control the current position on a tape, and all this would do is to remind everyone how inconvenient tapes are. Meanwhile, writing to disk images would be fairly convenient within the emulator, but then one would need to use tools to access the files within the images outside the emulator.

Some emulators for various systems also support the notion of a host filesystem (or filing system) where some special support has been added to make the emulated machine see another peripheral and to communicate with it, this peripheral really being a program on the host machine (the machine that is running the emulator). I could have just written such support, although it would also have needed some software support written for the emulated machine as well, but this approach would have led me down a path of doing something specific to emulation. And I have a principle of sorts which is that if I am going to change the way an emulated machine behaves, it has to be rooted in some kind of reality and not just enhance the emulated machine in a way that the original, “real” machine could not have been.

Building on Old Foundations

As noted earlier, I have an interest in the way that old products were conceived and the roles for which those products were intended by their originators. The Electron was largely sold as an unexpanded product, offering only power, display and cassette ports, with a general-purpose expansion connector being the gateway to anything else that might have been added to the system later. This was perceived somewhat negatively when the machine was launched because it was anticipated that buyers would probably, at the very least, want to plug joysticks into the Electron to play games. Instead, Acorn offered an expansion unit, the Plus 1, that cost another £60 which provided joystick, printer and cartridge connectors.

But this flexibility in expanding the machine meant that it could have been used as the basis for a fairly diverse range of specialised products. In fact, one of the Acorn founders, Chris Curry, enthused about the Electron as a platform for such products, and one such product did actually make it to market, in a way: the BT Merlin M2105 messaging terminal. This terminal combined the Electron with an expansion unit containing circuitry for communicating over a telephone line, a generic serial communications port, a printer port, as well as speech synthesis circuitry and a substantial amount of read-only memory (ROM) for communications software.

Back in the mid-1980s, telecommunications (or “telecoms”) was the next big thing, and enthusiasm for getting a modem and dialling up some “online” service or other (like Prestel) was prevalent in the computing press. For businesses and institutions, there were some good arguments for adopting such technologies, but for individuals the supposed benefits were rather dulled by the considerable costs of acquiring the hardware, buying subscriptions, and the notoriously high telephone call rates of the era. Only the relatively wealthy or the dedicated few pursued this side of data communications.

The M2105 reportedly did some service in the healthcare sector before being repositioned for commercial applications. Along with its successor product, the Acorn Communicator, it enjoyed a somewhat longer lifespan in certain enterprises. For the standard Electron and its accompanying expansions, support for basic communications capabilities was evidently considered important enough to be incorporated into the software of the Plus 1 expansion unit, even though the Plus 1 did not provide any of the specific hardware capabilities for communication over a serial link or a telephone line.

It was this apparently superfluous software capability that I revisited when I started to think about getting files in and out of the emulator. When emulating an Electron with Plus 1, this serial-capable software is run by the emulator, just as it is by a real Electron. On a real system of this kind, a cartridge could be added that provides a serial port and the necessary accompanying circuitry, and the system would be able to drive that hardware. Indeed, such cartridges were produced decades ago. So, if I could replicate the functionality of a cartridge within the emulator, making some code that pretends to be a serial communications chip (or UART) that has been interfaced to the Electron, then I would in principle be able to set up a virtual serial connection between the emulated Electron and my modern host computer.

Emulated Expansions

Modifying Elkulator to add support for serial communications hardware was fairly straightforward, with only a few complications. Expansion hardware on the Electron is generally accessible via a range of memory addresses that actually signal peripherals as opposed to reading and writing memory. The software provided by the Plus 1 expansion unit is written to expect the serial chip to be accessible via a range of memory locations, with the serial chip accepting values sent to those locations and producing values from those locations on request. The “memory map” through which the chip is exposed in the Electron corresponds directly to the locations or registers in the serial chip – the SCN2681 dual asynchronous receiver/transmitter (DUART) – as described by its datasheet.

In principle, all that is needed is to replicate the functionality described by the datasheet. With this done, the software will drive the chip, the emulated chip will do what is needed, and the illusion will be complete. In practice, a certain level of experimentation is needed to fill in the gaps left by the datasheet and any lack of understanding on the part of the implementer. It did help that the Plus 1 software has been disassembled – some kind of source code regenerated from the binary – so that the details of its operation and its expectations of the serial chip’s operation can be established.

Moreover, it is possible to save a bit of effort by seeing which features of the chip have been left unused. However, some unused features can be provided with barely any extra effort: the software only drives one serial port, but the chip supports two in largely the same way, so we can keep support for two just in case there is a need in future for such capabilities. Maybe someone might make a real serial cartridge with two ports and want to adapt the existing software, and they could at least test that software under emulation before moving to real hardware.

It has to be mentioned that the Electron’s operating system, known as the Machine Operating System or MOS, is effectively extended by the software provided in the Plus 1 unit. Even the unexpanded machine provides the foundations for adding serial communications and printing capabilities in different ways, and the Plus 1 software merely plugs into that framework. A different kind of serial chip would be driven by different software but it would plug into the same framework. At no point does anyone have to replace the MOS with a patched version, which seems to be the kind of thing that happens with some microcomputers from the same era.

Ultimately, what all of this means is that having implemented the emulated serial hardware, useful things can already be done with it within the bare computing environment provided by the MOS. One can set the output stream to use the serial port and have all the text produced by the system and programs sent over the serial connection. One can select the serial port for the input stream and send text to the computer instead of using the keyboard. And printing over the serial connection is also possible by selecting the appropriate printer type using a built-in system command.

In Elkulator, I chose to expose the serial port via a socket connection, with the emulator binding to a Unix domain socket on start-up. I then wrote a simple Python program to monitor the socket, to show any data being sent from the emulator and to send any input from the terminal to the emulator. This permitted the emulated machine to be operated from a kind of remote console and for the emulated machine to be able to print to this console. At last, remote logins are possible on the Electron! Of course, such connectivity was contemplated and incorporated from the earliest days of these products.

Filing Options

If the goal of all of this had been to facilitate transfers to and from the emulated machine, this might have been enough, but a simple serial connection is not especially convenient to use. Although a method of squirting a file into the serial link at the Electron could be made convenient for the host computer, at the other end one has to have a program to do something with that file. And once the data has arrived, would it not be most convenient to be able to save that data as a file? We just end up right back where we started: having some data inside the Electron and nowhere to put it! Of course, we could enable disk emulation and store a file on a virtual disk, but then it might just have been easier to make disk image handling outside the emulator more convenient instead.

It seemed to me that the most elegant solution would be to make the serial link act as the means through which the Electron accesses files. That instead of doing ad-hoc transfers of data, such data would be transferred as part of operations that are deliberately accessing files. Such ambitions are not unrealistic, and here I could draw on my experience with the platform, having acquired the Acorn Electron Advanced User Guide many, many years ago, in which there are details of implementing filing system ROMs. Again, the operating system had been designed to be extended in order to cover future needs, and this was one of them.

In fact, I had not been the only one to consider a serial filing system, and I had been somewhat aware of another project to make software available via a serial link to the BBC Micro. That project had been motivated by the desire to be able to get software onto that computer where no storage devices were otherwise available, even performing some ingenious tricks to transfer the filing system software to the machine and to have that software operate from RAM. It might have been tempting merely to use this existing software with my emulated serial port, to get it working, and then to get back to trying out applications, loading and saving, and to consider my work done. But I had other ideas in mind…

I was recently perusing the Retro Computing Forum when I stumbled across a mention of Collapse OS. If your anxiety levels have not already been maxed out during the last few years of climate breakdown, psychological warfare, pandemic, and actual warmongering, accompanied by supply chain breakdowns, initially in technology and exacerbated by overconsumption and spivcoin, now also in commodities and exacerbated by many of those other factors (particularly the warmongering), then perhaps focusing on societal and civilisational collapse isn’t going to improve your mood or your outlook. Unusually, then, after my last, rather negative post on such topics, may I be the one to introduce some constructive input and perhaps even some slight optimism?

If I understand the motivations behind Collapse OS correctly, it is meant to provide a modest computing environment that can work on well-understood, commonplace, easily repaired and readily sourced hardware, with the software providing the environment itself being maintainable on the target hardware, as opposed to being cross-built on more powerful hardware and then deployed to simpler, less capable hardware. The envisaged scenario for its adoption is a world where powerful new hardware is no longer produced or readily available and where people must scavenge and “make do” with the hardware already produced. Although civilisation may have brought about its own collapse, the consolation is that so much hardware will have been strewn across the planet for a variety of purposes that even after semiconductor fabrication and sophisticated manufacturing have ceased, there will remain a bounty of hardware usable for people’s computational needs (whatever they may be).

I am not one to try and predict the future, and I don’t really want to imagine it as being along the same lines as the plot for one of Kevin Costner’s less successful movies, either, but I feel that Collapse OS and its peers, in considering various dystopian scenarios and strategies to mitigate their impacts, may actually offer more than just a hopefully sufficient kind of preparedness for a depressing future. In that future, without super-fast Internet, dopamine-fired social media, lifelike gaming, and streaming video services with huge catalogues of content available on demand, everyone has to accept that far less technology will be available to them: they get no choice in the matter. Investigating how they might manage is at the very least an interesting thought experiment. But we would be foolish to consider such matters as purely part of a possible future and not instructive in other ways.

An Overlap of Interests

As readers of my previous articles will be aware, I have something of an interest in older computers, open source hardware, and sustainable computing. Older computers lend themselves to analysis and enhancement even by individuals with modest capabilities and tools because they employ technologies that may have been regarded as “miniaturised” when they were new, but they were still amenable to manual assembly and repair. Similarly, open source hardware has grown to a broad phenomenon because the means to make computing systems and accessories has now become more accessible to individuals, as opposed to being the preserve of large and well-resourced businesses. Where these activities experience challenges, it is typically in the areas that have not yet become quite as democratised, such as semiconductor fabrication at the large-scale integration level, along with the development and manufacture of more advanced technology, such as components and devices that would be competitive with off-the-shelf commercial products.

Some of the angst around open source hardware concerns the lack of investment it receives from those who would benefit from it, but much of that investment would largely be concerned with establishing an ability to maintain some kind of parity with modern, proprietary hardware. Ignoring such performance-led requirements and focusing on simpler hardware projects, as many people already do, brings us a lot closer to retrocomputing and a lot closer to the constrained hardware scenario envisaged by Collapse OS. My own experiments with PIC32-based microcontrollers are not too far removed from this, and it would not be inconceivable to run a simple environment in the 64K of RAM and 256K of flash memory of the PIC32MX270, this being much more generous than many microcomputers and games consoles of the 1980s.

Although I relied on cross-compilation to build the programs that would run on the minimal hardware of the PIC32 microcontroller, Collapse OS emphasises self-hosting: that it is possible to build the software within the running software itself. After all, how sustainable would a frugal computing environment be if it needed a much more powerful development system to fix and improve it? For Collapse OS, such self-hosting is enabled by the use of the Forth programming language, as explained by the rationale for switching to Forth from a system implemented in assembly language. Such use of Forth is not particularly unusual: its frugal demands were prized in the microcomputer era and earlier, with its creator Charles Moore describing the characteristics of a computer designed to run Forth as needing around 8K of RAM and 8K of ROM, this providing a complete interactive system.

(If you are interested in self-hosting and bootstrapping, one place to start might be the bootstrapping wiki.)

For a short while, Forth was perhaps even thought to be the hot new thing in some circles within computing. One fairly famous example was the Jupiter Ace microcomputer, developed by former Sinclair Research designers, offering a machine that followed on fairly closely from Sinclair’s rudimentary ZX81. But in a high-minded way one might have expected from the Sinclair stable and the Cambridge scene, it offered Forth as its built-in language in response to all the other microcomputers offering “unstructured” BASIC dialects. Worthy as such goals might have been, the introduction of a machine with outdated hardware specifications condemned it in its target market as a home computer, with it offering primitive black-and-white display output against competitors offering multi-colour graphics, and offering limited amounts of memory as competitors launched with far more fitted as standard. Interestingly, the Z80 processor at the heart of the Ace was the primary target of Collapse OS, and one might wonder if the latter might actually be portable to the former, which would be an interesting project if any hardware collector wants to give it a try!

Other Forth-based computers were delivered such as the Canon Cat: an unusual “information appliance” that might have formed the basis of Apple’s Macintosh had that project not been diverted towards following up on the Apple Lisa. Dedicated Forth processors were even delivered, as anticipated already by Moore back in 1980, reminiscent of the Lisp machine era. However, one hardware-related legacy of Forth is that of the Open Firmware standard where a Forth environment provides an interactive command-line interface to a system’s bootloader. Collapse OS fits in pretty well with that kind of application of Forth. Curiously, someone did contact me when I first wrote about my PIC32 experiments, this person maintaining their own microcontroller Forth implementation, and in the context of this article I have re-established contact because I never managed to properly follow up on the matter.

Changing the Context

According to a broad interpretation of the Collapse OS hardware criteria, the PIC32MX270 would actually not be a bad choice. Like the AVR microcontrollers and the microprocessors of the 1980s, PIC32MX microcontrollers are available in convenient dual in-line packages, but unlike those older microprocessors they also offer the 32-bit MIPS architecture that is nicer to program than the awkward instruction sets of the likes of the Z80 and 6502, no matter how much nostalgia colours people’s preferences. However, instead of focusing on hardware suitability in a resource-constrained future, I want to consider the messages of simplicity and sustainability that underpin the Collapse OS initiative and might be relevant to the way we practise computing today.

When getting a PIC32 microcontroller to produce a video signal, part of the motivation was just to see how straightforward it might be to make a simple “single chip” microcomputer. Like many microcomputers back in the 1980s, it became tempting to consider how it might be used to deliver graphical demonstrations and games, but I also wondered what kind of role such a system might have in today’s world. Similar projects, including the first versions of the Maximite have emphasised such things as well, along with interfacing and educational applications (such as learning BASIC). Indeed, many low-end microcontroller-based computers attempt to recreate and to emphasise the sparse interfaces of 1980s microcomputers as a distraction-free experience for learning and teaching.

Eliminating distractions is a worthy goal, whether those distractions are things that we can conveniently seek out when our attention wanders, such as all our favourite, readily accessible Internet content, or whether they come in the form of the notifications that plague “modern” user interfaces. Another is simply reducing the level of consumption involved in our computational activities: civilisational collapse would certainly impose severe limits on that kind of consumption, but it would seem foolish to acknowledge that and then continue on the same path of ever-increasing consumption that also increasingly fails to deliver significant improvements in the user experience. When desktop applications, mobile “apps”, and Web sites frequently offer sluggish and yet overly-simplistic interfaces that are more infuriating than anything else, it might be wise to audit our progress and reconsider how we do certain things.

Human nature has us constantly exploring the boundaries of what is possible with technology, but some things which captivate people at any given point on the journey of technological progress may turn out to be distracting diversions from the route ultimately taken. In my trawl of microcomputing history over the last couple of years, I was reminded of an absurd but illustrative example of how certain technological exercises seem to become the all-consuming focus of several developers, almost being developed for the sake of it, before the fad in question flames out and everybody moves on. That example concerned “morphing” software, inspired by visual effects from movies such as Terminator 2, but operating on a simpler, less convincing level.

Suddenly, such effects were all over the television and for a few months in late 1993, everyone was supposedly interested in making the likeness of one famous person slowly change into the likeness of another, never mind that it really required a good library of images, this being somewhat before widespread digital imaging and widespread image availability. Fast-forward a few years, and it all seemed like a crazy mass delusion best never spoken of again. We might want to review our own time’s obsessions with performative animations and effects, along with the peculiarities of touch-based interfaces, the assumption of pervasive and fast connectivity, and how these drive hardware consumption and obsolescence.

Once again, some of this comes back to asking how people managed to do things in earlier times and why things sometimes seem so complicated now. Thinking back to the 1980s era of microcomputing, my favourite 8-bit computer of those times was the Acorn Electron, this being the one I had back then, and it was certainly possible to equip it to do word processing to a certain level. Acorn even pitched an expanded version as a messaging terminal for British Telecom, although I personally think that they could have made more of such opportunities, especially given the machine’s 80-column text capabilities being made available at such a low price. The user experience would not exactly be appealing by today’s standards, but then nor would that of Collapse OS, either.

When I got my PIC32 experiment working reasonably, I asked myself if it would be sufficient for tasks like simple messaging and writing articles like this. The answer, assuming that I would enhance that effort to use a USB keyboard and external storage, is probably the same as whether anyone might use a Maximite for such applications: it might not be as comfortable as on a modern system but it would be possible in some way. Given the tricks I used, certain things would actually be regressions from the Electron, such as the display resolution. Conversely, the performance of a 48MHz MIPS-based processor is obviously going to be superior to a 2MHz 6502, even when having to generate the video signal, thus allowing for some potential in other areas.

Reversing Technological Escalation

Using low-specification hardware for various applications today, considering even the PIC32 as low-spec and ignoring the microcomputers of the past, would also need us to pare back the demands that such applications have managed to accumulate over the years. As more powerful, higher-performance hardware has become available, software, specifications and standards have opportunistically grown to take advantage of that extra power, leaving many people bewildered by the result: their new computer being just as slow as their old one, for example.

Standards can be particularly vulnerable where entrenched interests drive hardware consumption whilst seeking to minimise the level of adaptation their own organisations will need to undertake in order to deliver solutions based on such standards. A severely constrained computing device may not have the capacity or performance to handle all the quirks of a “full fat” standard, but it might handle an essential core of that standard, ignoring all the edge cases and special treatment for certain companies’ products. Just as important, the developers of an implementation handling a standard also may not have the capacity or tenacity for a “full fat” standard, but they may do a reasonable job handling one that cuts out all the corporate cruft.

And beyond the technology needed to perform some kind of transaction as part of an activity, we might reconsider what is necessary to actually perform that activity. Here, we may consider the more blatant case of the average “modern” Web site or endpoint, where an activity may end up escalating and involving the performance of a number of transactions, many of which superfluous and, in the case of the pervasive cult of analytics, exploitative. What once may have been a simple Web form is often now an “experience” where the browser connects to dozens of sites, where all the scripts poll the client computer into oblivion, and where the functionality somehow doesn’t manage to work, anyway (as I recently experienced on one airline’s Web site).

Technologists and their employers may drive consumption, but so do their customers. Public institutions, utilities and other companies may lazily rely on easily procured products and services, these insisting (for “security” or “the best experience”) that only the latest devices or devices from named vendors may be used to gain access. Here, the opposite of standardisation occurs, where adherence to brand names dictates the provision of service, compounded by the upgrade treadmill familiar from desktop computing, bringing back memories of Microsoft and Intel ostensibly colluding to get people to replace their computer as often as possible.

A Broader Brush

We don’t need to go back to retrocomputing levels of technology to benefit from re-evaluating the prevalent technological habits of our era. I have previously discussed single-board computers like the MIPS Creator CI20 which, in comparison to contemporary boards from the Raspberry Pi series, was fairly competitive in terms of specification and performance (having twice the RAM of the Raspberry Pi Models A+, B and B+). Although hardly offering conventional desktop performance upon its introduction, the CI20 would have made a reasonable workstation in certain respects in earlier times: its 1GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM should certainly be plenty for many applications even now.

Sadly, starting up and using the main two desktop environments on the CI20 is an exercise in patience, and I recommend trying something like the MATE desktop environment just for something responsive. Using a Web browser like Firefox is a trial, and extensive site blocking is needed just to prevent the browser wanting to download things from all over the place, as it tries to do its bit in shoring up Google’s business model. My father was asking me the other day why a ten-year-old computer might be slow on a “modern” Web site but still perfectly adequate for watching video. I would love to hear the Firefox and Chrome developers, along with the “architects of the modern Web”, give any explanation for this that doesn’t sound like they are members of some kind of self-realisation cult.

If we can envisage a microcomputer, either a vintage one or a modern microcontroller-based one, performing useful computing activities, then we can most certainly envisage machines of ten or so years ago, even ones behind the performance curve, doing so as well. And by realising that, we might understand that we might even have the power to slow down the engineered obsolescence of computing hardware, bring usable hardware back into use, and since not everyone on the planet can afford the latest and greatest, we might even put usable hardware into the hands of more people who might benefit from it.

Naturally, this perspective is rather broader than one that only considers a future of hardship and scarcity, but hardship and scarcity are part of the present, just as they have always been part of the past. Applying many of the same concerns and countermeasures to today’s situation, albeit in less extreme forms, means that we have the power to mitigate today’s situation and, if we are optimistic, perhaps steer it away from becoming the extreme situation that the Collapse OS initiative seeks to prepare for.

Concrete Steps

I have, in the past, been accused of complaining about injustices too generally for my complaints to be taken seriously, never mind such injustices being blatant and increasingly obvious in our modern societies and expressed through the many crises of our times. So how might we seek to mitigate widespread hardware obsolescence and technology-driven overconsumption? Some suggestions in a concise list for those looking for actionable things:

• Develop, popularise and mandate lightweight formats, protocols and standards
• Encourage interoperability and tolerance for multiple user interfaces, clients and devices
• Insist on an unlimited “right to repair” for computing devices including the software
• Encourage long-term thinking in software and systems development

And now for some elucidation…

Mandatory Accessible Standards

This suggestion has already been described above, but where it would gain its power is in the idea of mandating that public institutions and businesses would be obliged to support lightweight formats, protocols and standards, and not simply as an implementation detail for their chosen “app”, like a REST endpoint might be, but actually as a formal mechanism providing service to those who would interact with those institutions. This would make the use of a broad range of different devices viable, and in the case of special-purpose devices for certain kinds of users, particularly those who would otherwise be handed a smartphone and told to “get with it”, it would offer a humane way of accessing services that is currently denied to them.

For simple dialogue-based interactions, existing formats such as JSON might even be sufficient as they are. I am reminded of a paper I read when putting together my degree thesis back in the 1990s, where the idea was that people would be able to run programs safely in their mail reader, with one example being that of submitting forms.

T-shirt ordering dialogues shown by Safe-Tcl running in a mail program, offering the recipient the chance to order some merchandise that might not be as popular now.

In that paper, most of the emphasis was on the safety of the execution environment as opposed to the way in which the transaction was to be encoded, but it is not implausible that one might have encoded the details of the transaction – the T-shirt size (with the recipient’s physical address presumably already being known to the sender) – in a serialised form of the programming language concerned (Safe-Tcl) as opposed to just dumping some unstructured text in the body of a mail. I would need to dig out my own thesis to see what ideas I had for serialised information. Certainly, such transactions even embellished with other details and choices and with explanatory information, prompts and questions do not require megabytes of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, videos and so on.

Interoperability and Device Choice

One thing that the Web was supposed to liberate us from was the insistence that to perform a particular task, we needed a particular application, and that particular application was only available on a particular platform. In the early days, HTML was deliberately simplistic in its display capabilities, and people had to put up with Web pages that looked very plain until things like font tags allowed people to go wild. With different factions stretching HTML in all sorts of directions, CSS was introduced to let people apply presentation attributes to documents, supposedly without polluting or corrupting the original HTML that would remain semantically pure. We all know how this turned out, particularly once the Web 2.0 crowd got going.

Back in the 1990s, I worked on an in-house application at my employer that used a document model inspired by SGML (as HTML had been), and the graphical user interface to the documents being exchanged initially offered a particular user interface paradigm when dealing with collections of data items, this being the one embraced by the Macintosh’s Finder when showing directory hierarchies in what we would now call a tree view. Unfortunately, users seemed to find expanding and hiding things by clicking on small triangles to be annoying, and so alternative presentation approaches were explored. Interestingly, the original paradigm would be familiar even now to those using generic XML editor software, but many people would accept that while such low-level editing capabilities are nice to have, higher-level representations of the data are usually much more preferable.

Such user preferences could quite easily be catered to through the availability of client software that works in the way they expect, rather than the providers of functionality or the operators of services trying to gauge what the latest fashions in user interfaces might be, as we have all seen when familiar Web sites change to mimic something one would expect to see on a smartphone, even with a large monitor on a desk with plenty of pixels to spare. With well-defined standards, if a client device or program were to see that it needed to allow a user to peruse a large collection of items or to choose a calendar date, it would defer to the conventions of that device or platform, giving the user the familiarity they expect.

This would also allow clients and devices with a wide range of capabilities to be used. The Web tried to deliver a reasonable text-only experience for a while, but most sites can hardly be considered usable in a textual browser these days. And although there is an “accessibility story” for the Web, it largely appears to involve retrofitting sites with semantic annotations to help users muddle through the verbose morass encoded in each page. Certainly, the Web of today does do one thing reasonably by mixing up structure and presentation: it can provide a means of specifying and navigating new kinds of data that might be unknown to the client, showing them something more than a text box. A decent way of extending the range of supported data types would be needed in any alternative, but it would need to spare everyone suddenly having scripts running all over the place.

Rights to Repair

The right to repair movement has traditionally been focused on physical repairs to commercial products, making sure that even if the manufacturer has abandoned a product and really wants you to buy something new from them, you can still choose to have the product repaired so that it can keep serving you well for some time to come. But if hardware remains capable enough to keep doing its job, and if we are able to slow down or stop the forces of enforced obsolescence, we also need to make sure that the software running on the hardware may also be repaired, maintained and updated. A right to repair very much applies to software.

Devotees of the cult of the smartphone, those who think that there is an “app” for everything, should really fall silent with shame. Not just for shoehorning every activity they can think of onto a device that is far from suitable for everyone, and not just for mandating commercial relationships with large multinational corporations for everyone, but also for the way that happily functioning smartphones have to be discarded because they run software that is too old and cannot be fixed or upgraded. Demanding the right to exercise the four freedoms of Free Software for our devices means that we get to decide when those devices are “too old” for what we want to use them for. If a device happens to be no longer usable for its original activity even after some Free Software repairs, we can repurpose it for something else, instead of having the vendor use those familiar security scare stories and pretending that they are acting in our best interests.

Long-Term Perspectives

If we are looking to preserve the viability of our computing devices by demanding interoperability to give them a chance to participate in the modern world and by demanding that they may be repaired, we also need to think about how the software we develop may itself remain viable, both in terms of the ability to run the software on available devices as well as the ability to keep maintaining, improving and repairing it. That potentially entails embracing unfashionable practices because “modern” practices do not exactly seem conducive to the kind of sustainable activities we have in mind.

I recently had the opportunity to contemplate the deployment of software in “virtual environments” containing entire software stacks, each of which running their own Web server program, that would receive their traffic from another Web server program running in the same virtual machine, all of this running in some cloud infrastructure. It was either that or using containers containing whole software distributions, these being deployed inside virtual machines containing their own software distributions. All because people like to use the latest and greatest stuff for everything, this stuff being constantly churned by fashionable development methodologies and downloaded needlessly over and over again from centralised Internet services run by monopolists.

Naturally, managing gigabytes of largely duplicated software is worlds, if not galaxies, away from the modest computing demands of things like Collapse OS, but it would be distasteful to anyone even a decade ago and shocking to anyone even a couple of decades ago. Unfashionable as it may seem now, software engineering courses once emphasised things like modularity and the need for formal interfaces between modules in systems. And a crucial benefit of separating out functionality into modules is to allow those modules to mature, do the job they were designed for, and to recede into the background and become something that can be relied upon and not need continual, intensive maintenance. There is almost nothing better than writing a library that one may use constantly but never need to touch again.

Thus, the idea that a precarious stack of precisely versioned software is required to deliver a solution is absurd, but it drives the attitude that established software distributions only deliver “old” software, and it drives the demand for wasteful container or virtual environment solutions whose advocates readily criticise traditional distributions whilst pilfering packages from them. Or as Docker users might all too easily say, “FROM debian:sid”. Part of the problem is that it is easy to rely on methods of mass consumption to solve problems with software – if something is broken, just update and see if it fixes it – but such attitudes permeate the entire development process, leading to continual instability and a software stack constantly in flux.

Dealing with a multitude of software requirements is certainly a challenging problem that established operating systems struggle to resolve convincingly, despite all the shoehorning of features into the Linux technology stack. Nevertheless, the topic of operating system design is rather outside the scope of this article. Closer to relevance is the matter of how people seem reluctant to pick a technology and stick with it, particularly in the realm of programming languages. Then again, I covered much of this before and fairly recently, too. Ultimately, we want to be establishing software stacks that people can readily acquaint themselves with decades down the line, without the modern-day caveats that “feature X changed in version Y” and that if you were not there at the time, you have quite the job to do to catch up with that and everything else that went on, including migrations to a variety of source management tools and venues, maybe even completely new programming languages.

A Different Mindset

If anything, Collapse OS makes us consider a future beyond tomorrow, next week, next year, or a few years’ time. Even if the wheels do not start falling off the vehicle of human civilisation, there are still plenty of other things that can go away without much notice. Corporations like Apple and Google might stick around, whether that is good news or not, but it does not stop them from pulling the plug on products and services. Projects and organisations do not always keep going forever, not least because they are often led by people who cannot keep going forever, either.

There are ways we can mitigate these threats to sustainability and longevity, however. We can share our software through accessible channels without insisting that others use those monopolist-run centralised hosting services. We can document our software so that others have a chance of understanding what we were thinking when we wrote it. We can try and keep the requirements for our software modest and give people a chance to deploy it on modest hardware. And we might think about what kind of world we are leaving behind and whether it is better than the world we were born into.

A surprising three years have passed since my last article about my efforts to make a general-purpose filesystem accessible to programs running in the L4 (or L4Re) Runtime Environment. Some of that delay was due to a lack of enthusiasm about blogging for various reasons, much more was due to having much of my time occupied by full-time employment involving other technologies (Python and Django mostly, since you ask) that limited the amount of time and energy that could be spent focusing on finding my way around the intricacies of L4Re.

In fact, various other things I looked into in 2019 (or maybe 2018) also went somewhat unreported. I looked into trying to port the “user mode” (UX) variant of the Fiasco.OC microkernel to the MIPS architecture used by the MIPS Creator CI20. This would have allowed me to conveniently develop and test L4Re programs in the GNU/Linux environment on that hardware. I did gain some familiarity with the internals of that software, together with the Linux ptrace mechanism, making some progress but not actually getting to a usable conclusion. Recommendations to use QEMU instead led me to investigate the situation with KVM on MIPS, simply to try and get half-way reasonable performance: emulation is otherwise rather slow.

You wouldn’t think that running KVM on anything other than Intel/AMD or ARM architectures were possible if you only read the summary on the KVM project page or the Debian Wiki’s KVM page. In fact, KVM is supported on multiple architectures including MIPS, but the latest (and by now very old 3.18) “official” kernel for the CI20 turned out to be too old to support what I needed. Or at least, I tried to get it to work but even with all the necessary configuration to support “trap and emulate” on a CPU without virtualisation support, it seemed to encounter instructions it did not emulate. As the hot summer of 2019 (just like 2018) wound down, I switched back to using my main machine at the time: an ancient Pentium 4 system that I didn’t want heating the apartment; one that could run QEMU rather slowly, albeit faster than the CI20, but which gave me access to Fiasco.OC-UX once again.

Since then, the hard yards of upstreaming Linux kernel device support for the CI20 has largely been pursued by the ever-patient Nikolaus Schaller, vendor of the Letux 400 mini-notebook and hardware designer of the Pyra, and a newer kernel capable of running KVM satisfactorily might now be within reach. That is something to be investigated somewhere in the future.

Back to the Topic

In my last article on the topic of this article, I had noted that to take advantage of various features that L4Re offers, I would need to move on from providing a simple mechanism to access files through read and write operations, instead embracing the memory mapping paradigm that is pervasive in L4Re, adopting such techniques to expose file content to programs. This took us through a tour of dataspaces, mapping, pages, flexpages, virtual memory and so on. Ultimately, I had a few simple programs working that could still read and write to files, but they would be doing so via a region of memory where pages of this memory would be dynamically “mapped” – made available – and populated with file content. I even integrated the filesystem “client” library with the Newlib C library implementation, but that is another story.

Nothing is ever simple, though. As I stressed the test programs, introducing concurrent access to files, crashes would occur in the handling of the pages issued to the clients. Since I had ambitiously decided that programs accessing the same files would be able to share memory regions assigned to those files, with two or more programs being issued with access to the same memory pages if they happened to be accessing the same areas of the underlying file, I had set myself up for the accompanying punishment: concurrency errors! Despite the heroic help of l4-hackers mailing list regulars (Frank and Jean), I had to concede that a retreat, some additional planning, and then a new approach would be required. (If nothing else, I hope this article persuades some l4-hackers readers that their efforts in helping me are not entirely going to waste!)

Prototyping an Architecture

In some spare time a couple of years ago, I started sketching out what I needed to consider when implementing such an architecture. Perhaps bizarrely, given the nature of the problem, my instinct was to prototype such an architecture in Python, running as a normal program on my GNU/Linux system. Now, Python is not exactly celebrated for its concurrency support, given the attention its principal implementation, CPython, has often had for a lack of scalability. However, whether or not the Python implementation supports running code in separate threads simultaneously, or whether it merely allows code in threads to take turns running sequentially, the most important thing was that I could have code happily running along being interrupted at potentially inconvenient moments by some other code that could conceivably ruin everything.

Fortunately, Python has libraries for threading and provides abstractions like semaphores. Such facilities would be all that was needed to introduce concurrency control in the different program components, allowing the simulation of the mechanisms involved in acquiring memory pages, populating them, issuing them to clients, and revoking them. It may sound strange to even consider simulating memory pages in Python, which operates at another level entirely, and the issuing of pages via a simulated interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism might seem unnecessary and subject to inaccuracy, but I found it to be generally helpful in refining my approach and even deepening my understanding of concepts such as flexpages, which I had applied in a limited way previously, making me suspect that I had not adequately tested the limits of my understanding.

Naturally, L4Re development is probably never done in Python, so I then had the task of reworking my prototype in C++. Fortunately, this gave me the opportunity to acquaint myself with the more modern support in the C++ standard libraries for threading and concurrency, allowing me to adopt constructs such as mutexes, condition variables and lock guards. Some of this exercise was frustrating: C++ is, after all, a lower-level language that demands more attention to various mundane details than Python does. It did suggest potential improvements to Python’s standard library, however, although I don’t really pay any attention to Python core development any more, so unless someone else has sought to address such issues, I imagine that Python will gain even more in the way of vanity features while such genuine deficiencies and omissions remain unrecognised.

Transplanting the Prototype

Upon reintroducing this prototype functionality into L4Re, I decided to retain the existing separation of functionality into various libraries within the L4Re build system – ones for filesystem clients, servers, IPC – also making a more general memory abstractions library, but I ultimately put all these libraries within a single package. At some point, it is this package that I will be making available, and I think that it will be easier to evaluate with all the functionality in a single bundle. The highest priority was then to test the mechanisms employed by the prototype using the same concurrency stress test program, this originally being written in Python, then ported to C++, having been used in my GNU/Linux environment to loosely simulate the conditions under L4Re.

This stress testing exercise eventually ended up working well enough, but I did experience issues with resource limits within L4Re as well as some concurrency issues with capability management that I should probably investigate further. My test program opens a number of files in a number of threads and attempts to read various regions of these files over and over again. I found that I would run out of capability slots, these tracking the references to other components available to a task in L4Re, and since each open file descriptor or session would require a slot, as would each thread, I had to be careful not to exceed the default budget of such slots. Once again, with help from another l4-hackers participant (Philipp), I realised that I wasn’t releasing some of the slots in my own code, but I also learned that above a certain number of threads, open files, and so on, I would need to request more resources from the kernel. The concurrency issue with allocating individual capability slots remains unexplored, but since I already wrap the existing L4Re functionality in my own library, I just decided to guard the allocation functionality with semaphores.

With some confidence in the test program, which only accesses simulated files with computed file content, I then sought to restore functionality accessing genuine files, these being the read-only files already exposed within L4Re along with ext2-resident files previously supported by my efforts. The former kind of file was already simulated in the prototype in the form of “host” files, although L4Re unhelpfully gives an arbitary (counter) value for the inode identifiers for each file, so some adjustments were required. Meanwhile, introducing support for the latter kind of file led me to update the bundled version of libext2fs I am using, refine various techniques for adapting the upstream code, introduce more functionality to help use libext2fs from my own code (since libext2fs can be rather low-level), and to consider the broader filesystem support architecture.

Here is the general outline of the paging mechanism supporting access to filesystem content:

The data structures employed to provide filesystem content to programs.

It is rather simplistic, and I have practically ignored complicated page replacement algorithms. In practice, pages are obtained for use when a page fault occurs in a program requesting a particular region of file content, and fulfilment of this request will move a page to the end of a page queue. Any independent requests for pages providing a particular file region will also reset the page’s position in the queue. However, since successful accesses to pages will not cause programs to repeatedly request those pages, eventually those pages will move to the front of the queue and be reclaimed.

Without any insight into how much programs are accessing a page successfully, relying purely on the frequency of page faults, I imagine that various approaches can be adopted to try and assess the frequency of accesses, extrapolating from the page fault frequency and seeking to “bias” or “weight” pages with a high frequency of requests so that they move through the queue more slowly or, indeed, move through a queue that provides pages less often. But all of this is largely a distraction from getting a basic mechanism working, so I haven’t directed any more time to it than I have just now writing this paragraph!

Files and File Sessions

While I am quite sure that I ended up arriving at a rather less than optimal approach for the paging architecture, I found that the broader filesystem architecture also needed to be refined further as I restored the functionality that I had previously attempted to provide. When trying to support shared access to file content, it is appropriate to implement some kind of registry of open files, these retaining references to objects that are providing access to each of the open files. Previously, this had been done in a fairly simple fashion, merely providing a thread-safe map or dictionary yielding the appropriate file-related objects when present, otherwise permitting new objects to be registered.

Again, concurrency issues needed closer consideration. When one program requests access to a file, it is highly undesirable for another program to interfere during the process of finding the file, if it exists already, or creating the file, if it does not. Therefore, there must be some kind of “gatekeeper” for the file, enforcing sequential access to filesystem operations involving it and ensuring that any preparatory activities being undertaken to make a file available, or to remove a file, are not interrupted or interfered with. I came up with an architecture looking like this, with a resource registry being the gatekeeper, resources supporting file sessions, providers representing open files, and accessors transferring data to and from files:

The data structures employed to provide access to the underlying filesystem objects.

I became particularly concerned with the behaviour of the system around file deletion. On Unix systems, it is fairly well understood that one can “unlink” an existing file and keep accessing it, as long as a file descriptor has been retained to access that file. Opening a file with the same name as the unlinked file under such circumstances will create a new file, provided that the appropriate options are indicated, or otherwise raise a non-existent file error, and yet the old file will still exist somewhere. Any new file with the same name can be unlinked and retained similarly, and so on, building up a catalogue of old files that ultimately will be removed when the active file descriptors are closed.

I thought I might have to introduce general mechanisms to preserve these Unix semantics, but the way the ext2 filesystem works largely encodes them to some extent in its own abstractions. In fact, various questions that I had about Unix filesystem semantics and how libext2fs might behave were answered through the development of various test programs, some being normal programs accessing files in my GNU/Linux environment, others being programs that would exercise libext2fs in that environment. Having some confidence that libext2fs would do the expected thing leads me to believe that I can rely on it at least for some of the desired semantics of the eventual system.

The only thing I really needed to consider was how the request to remove a file when that file was still open would affect the “provider” abstraction permitting continued access to the file contents. Here, I decided to support a kind of deferred removal: if a program requested the removal of a file, the provider and the file itself would be marked for removal upon the final closure of the file, but the provider for the file would no longer be available for new usage, and the file would be unlinked; programs already accessing the file would continue to operate, but programs opening a file of the same name would obtain a new file and a new provider.

The key to this working satisfactorily is that libext2fs will assign a new inode identifier when opening a new file, whereas an unlinked file retains its inode identifier. Since providers are indexed by inode identifier, and since libext2fs translates the path of a file to the inode identifier associated with the file in its directory entry, attempts to access a recreated file will always yield the new inode identifier and thus the new file provider.

Pipes, Listings and Notifications

In the previous implementation of this filesystem functionality, I had explored some other aspects of accessing a filesystem. One of these was the ability to obtain directory listings, usually exposed in Unix operating systems by the opendir and readdir functions. The previous implementation sought to expose such listings as files, this in an attempt to leverage the paging mechanisms already built, but the way that libext2fs provides such listing information is not particularly compatible with the random-access file model: instead, it provides something more like an iterator that involves the repeated invocation of a callback function, successively supplying each directory entry for the callback function to process.

For this new implementation, I decided to expose directory listings via pipes, with a server thread accessing the filesystem and, in that callback function, writing directory entries to one end of a pipe, and with a client thread reading from the other end of the pipe. Of course, this meant that I needed to have an implementation of pipes! In my previous efforts, I did implement pipes as a kind of investigation, and one can certainly make this very complicated indeed, but I deliberately kept this very simple in this current round of development, merely having a couple of memory regions, one being used by the reader and one being used by the writer, with each party transferring the regions to the other (and blocking) if they find themselves respectively running out of content or running out of space.

One necessary element in making pipes work is that of coordinating the reading and writing parties involved. If we restrict ourselves to a pipe that will not expand (or even not expand indefinitely) to accommodate more data, at some point a writer may fill the pipe and may then need to block, waiting for more space to become available again. Meanwhile, a reader may find itself encountering an empty pipe, perhaps after having read all available data, and it may need to block and wait for more content to become available again. Readers and writers both need a way of waiting efficiently and requesting a notification for when they might start to interact with the pipe again.

To support such efficient blocking, I introduced a notifier abstraction for use in programs that could be instantiated and a reference to such an instance (in the form of a capability) presented in a subscription request to the pipe endpoint. Upon invoking the wait operation on a notifier, the notifier will cause the program (or a thread within a program) to wait for the delivery of a notification from the pipe, this being efficient because the thread will then sleep, only to awaken if a message is sent to it. Here is how pipes make use of notifiers to support blocking reads and writes:

The use of notifications when programs communicate via a pipe.

A certain amount of plumbing is required behind the scenes to support notifications. Since programs accessing files will have their own sessions, there needs to be a coordinating object representing each file itself, this being able to propagate notification events to the users of the file concerned. Fortunately, I introduced the notion of a “provider” object in my architecture that can act in such a capacity. When an event occurs, the provider will send a notification to each of the relevant notifier endpoints, also providing some indication of the kind of event occurring. Previously, I had employed L4Re’s IRQ (interrupt request) objects as a means of delivering notifications to programs, but these appear to be very limited and do not allow additional information to be conveyed, as far as I can tell.

One objective I had with a client-side notifier was to support waiting for events from multiple files or streams collectively, instead of requiring a program to have threads that wait for events from each file individually, thus attempting to support the functionality provided by Unix functions like select and poll. Such functionality relies on additional information indicating the kind of event that has occurred. The need to wait for events from numerous sources also inverts the roles of client and server, with a notifier effectively acting like a server but residing in a client program, waiting for messages from its clients, these typically residing in the filesystem server framework.

Testing and Layering

Previously, I found that it was all very well developing functionality, but only through a commitment to testing it would I discover its flaws. When having to develop functionality at a number of levels in a system at the same time, testing generally starts off in a fairly limited fashion. Initially, I reintroduced a “block” server that merely provides access to a contiguous block of data, this effectively simulating storage device access that will hopefully be written at some point, and although genuine filesystem support utilises this block server, it is reassuring to be able to know whether it is behaving correctly. Meanwhile, for programs to access servers, they must send requests to those servers, assisted by a client library that provides support for such interprocess communication at a fairly low level. Thus, initial testing focused on using this low-level support to access the block server and verify that it provides access to the expected data.

On top of the lowest-level library functionality is a more usable level of “client” functions that automates the housekeeping needing to be done so that programs may expect an experience familiar to that provided by traditional C library functionality. Again, testing of file operations at that level helped to assess whether library and server functionality was behaving in line with expectations. With some confidence, the previously-developed ext2 filesystem functionality was reintroduced and updated. By layering the ext2 filesystem server on top of the block server, the testing activity is actually elevated to another level: libext2fs absolutely depends on properly functioning access to the block device; otherwise, it will not be able to perform even the simplest operations on files.

When acquainting myself with libext2fs, I developed a convenience library called libe2access that encapsulates some of the higher-level operations, and I made a tool called e2access that is able to populate a filesystem image from a normal program. This tool, somewhat reminiscent of the mtools suite that was popular at one time to allow normal users to access floppy disks on a system, is actually a fairly useful thing to have, and I remain surprised that there isn’t anything like it in common use. In any case, e2access allows me to populate images for use in L4Re, but I then thought that an equivalent to it would also be useful in L4Re for testing purposes. Consequently, a tool called fsaccess was created, but unlike e2access it does not use libe2access or libext2fs directly: instead, it uses the “client” filesystem library, exercising filesystem access via the IPC system and filesystem server architecture.

Ultimately, testing will be done completely normally using C library functions, these wrapping the “client” library. At that point, there will be no distinction between programs running within L4Re and within Unix. To an extent, L4Re already supports normal Unix-like programs using C library functions, this being particularly helpful when developing all this functionality, but of course it doesn’t support “proper” filesystems or Unix-like functionality in a particularly broad way, with various common C library or POSIX functions being stubs that do nothing. Of course, all this effort started out precisely to remedy these shortcomings.

Paging, Loading and Running Programs

Beyond explicitly performed file access, the next level of mutually-reinforcing testing and development came about through the simple desire to have a more predictable testing environment. In wanting to be able to perform tests sequentially, I needed control over the initiation of programs and to be able to rely on their completion before initiating successive programs. This may well be possible within L4Re’s Lua-based scripting environment, but I generally find the details to be rather thin on the ground. Besides, the problem provided some motivation to explore and understand the way that programs are launched in the environment.

There is some summary-level information about how programs (or tasks) are started in L4Re – for example, pages 41 onwards of “Memory, IPC, and L4Re” – but not much in the way of substantial documentation otherwise. Digging into the L4Re libraries yielded a confusing array of classes and apparent interactions which presumably make sense to anyone who is already very familiar with the specific approach being taken, as well as the general techniques being applied, but it seems difficult for outsiders to distinguish between the specifics and the generalities.

Nevertheless, some ideas were gained from looking at the code for various L4Re components including Moe (the root task), Ned (the init program), the loader and utilities libraries, and the oddly-named l4re_kernel component, this actually providing the l4re program which itself hosts actual programs by providing the memory management functionality necessary for those programs to work. In fact, we will eventually be looking at a solution that replicates that l4re program.

A substantial amount of investigation and testing took place to explore the topic. There were a number of steps required to initialise a new program:

1. Open the program executable file and obtain details of the different program segments and the program’s start address, this requiring some knowledge of ELF binaries.
2. Initialise a stack for the program containing the arguments to be presented to it, plus details of the program’s environment. The environment is of particular concern.
3. Create a task for the program together with a thread to begin execution at the start address, setting the stack pointer to the appropriate place in where the stack should be made available.
4. Initialise a control block for the thread.
5. Start the thread. This should immediately generate a page fault because the memory at the start address is not yet available within the task.
6. Service page faults for the program, providing pages for the program code – thus resolving that initial page fault – as well as for the stack and other regions of memory.

Naturally, each of these steps entails a lot more work than is readily apparent. Particularly the last step is something of an understatement in terms of what is required: the mechanism by which demand paging of the program is to be achieved.

L4Re provides some support for inspecting ELF binaries in its utilities library, but I found the ELF specification to be very useful in determining the exact purposes of various program header fields. For more practical guidance, the OSDev wiki page about ELF provides an explanation of the program loading process, along with how the different program segments are to be applied in the initialisation of a new program or process. With this information to hand, together with similar descriptions in the context of L4Re, it became possible to envisage how the address space of a new program might be set up, determining which various parts of the program file might be installed and where they might be found. I wrote some test programs, making some use of the structures in the utilities library, but wrote my own functions to extract the segment details from an ELF binary.

I found a couple of helpful resources describing the initialisation of the program stack: “Linux x86 Program Start Up” and “How statically linked programs run on Linux”. These mainly demystify the code that is run when a program starts up, setting up a program before the user’s main function is called, giving a degree of guidance about the work required to set up the stack so that such code may perform as expected. I was, of course, also able to study what the various existing L4Re components were doing in this respect, although I found the stack abstractions used to be idiomatic C/C++ bordering on esoteric. Nevertheless, the exercise involves obtaining some memory that can eventually be handed over to the new program, populating that memory, and then making it available to the new program, either immediately or on request.

Although I had already accumulated plenty of experience passing object capabilities around in L4Re, as well as having managed to map memory between tasks by sending the appropriate message items, the exact methods of setting up another task with memory and capabilities had remained mysterious to me, and so began another round of experimentation. What I wanted to do was to take a fairly easy route to begin with: create a task, populate some memory regions containing the program code and stack, transfer these things to the new task (using the l4_task_map function), and then start the thread to run the program, just to see what happened. Transferring capabilities was fairly easily achieved, and the L4Re libraries and frameworks do employ the equivalent of l4_task_map in places like the Remote_app_model class found in libloader, albeit obfuscated by the use of the corresponding C++ abstractions.

Frustratingly, this simple approach did not seem to work for the memory, and I could find only very few cases of anyone trying to use l4_task_map (or its equivalent C++ incantations) to transfer memory. Despite the memory apparently being transferred to the new task, the thread would immediately cause a page fault. Eventually, a page fault is what we want, but that would only occur because no memory would be made available initially, precisely because we would be implementing a demand paging solution. In the case of using l4_task_map to set up program memory, there should be no new “demand” for pages of such memory, this demand having been satisfied in advance. Nevertheless, I decided to try and get a page fault handler to supply flexpages to resolve these faults, also without success.

Having checked and double-checked my efforts, an enquiry on the l4-hackers list yielded the observation that the memory I had reserved and populated had not been configured as “executable”, for use by code in running programs. And indeed, since I had relied on the plain posix_memalign function to allocate that memory, it wasn’t set up for such usage. So, I changed my memory allocation strategy to permit the allocation of appropriately executable memory, and fortunately the problem was solved. Further small steps were then taken. I sought to introduce a region mapper that would attempt to satisfy requests for memory regions occurring in the new program, these occurring because a program starting up in L4Re will perform some setting up activities of its own. These new memory regions would be recognised by the page fault handler, with flexpages supplied to resolve page faults involving those regions. Eventually, it became possible to run a simple, statically-linked program in its own task.

When loading and running a new program, an external page fault handler makes sure that accesses to memory are supported by memory regions that may be populated with file content.

Up to this point, the page fault handler had been external to the new task and had been supplying memory pages from its own memory regions. Requests for data from the program file were being satisfied by accessing the appropriate region of the file, this bringing in the data using the file’s paging mechanism, and then supplying a flexpage for that part of memory to the program running in the new task. This particular approach compels the task containing the page fault handler to have a memory region dedicated to the file. However, the more elegant solution involves having a page fault handler communicating directly with the file’s pager component which will itself supply flexpages to map the requested memory pages into the new task. And to be done most elegantly, the page fault handler needs to be resident in the same task as the actual program.

Putting the page fault handler and the actual program in the same task demanded some improvements in the way I was setting up tasks and threads, providing capabilities to them, and so on. Separate stacks need to be provided for the handler and the program, and these will run in different threads. Moving the page fault handler into the new task is all very well, but we still need to be able to handle page faults that the “internal” handler might cause, so this requires us to retain an “external” handler. So, the configuration of the handler and program are slightly different.

Another tricky aspect of this arrangement is how the program is configured to send its page faults to the handler running alongside it – the internal handler – instead of the one servicing the handler itself. This requires an IPC gate to be created for the internal handler, presented to it via its configuration, and then the handler will bind to this IPC gate when it starts up. The program may then start up using a reference to this IPC gate capability as its “pager” or page fault handler. You would be forgiven for thinking that all of this can be quite difficult to orchestrate correctly!

An IPC gate must be created and presented to the page fault handler for it to bind to before it is presented to the program as its “pager”.

Although I had previously been sending flexpages in messages to satisfy map requests, the other side of such transactions had not been investigated. Senders of map requests will specify a “receive window” to localise the placement of flexpages returned from such requests, this being an intrinsic part of the flexpage concept. Here, some aspects of the IPC system became more prominent and I needed to adjust the code generated by my interface description language tool which had mostly ignored the use of message buffer registers, employing them only to control the reception of object capabilities.

More testing was required to ensure that I was successfully able to request the mapping of memory in a particular region and that the supplied memory did indeed get mapped into the appropriate place. With that established, I was then able to modify the handler deployed to the task. Since the flexpage returned by the dataspace (or resource) providing access to file content effectively maps the memory into the receiving task, the page fault handler does not need to explicitly return a valid flexpage: the mapping has already been done. The semantics here were not readily apparent, but this approach appears to work correctly.

An internal page fault handler satisfies accesses to memory from the program running in the same task, providing it with access to memory regions that may be populated with file content.

One other detail that proved to be important was that of mapping file content to memory regions so that they would not overlap somehow and prevent the correct region from being used to satisfy page faults. Consider the following regions of the test executable file described by the readelf utility (with the -l option):

  Type           Offset             VirtAddr           PhysAddr
                 FileSiz            MemSiz              Flags  Align
  LOAD           0x0000000000000000 0x0000000001000000 0x0000000001000000
                 0x00000000000281a6 0x00000000000281a6  R E    0x1000
  LOAD           0x0000000000028360 0x0000000001029360 0x0000000001029360
                 0x0000000000002058 0x0000000000008068  RW     0x1000

Here, we need to put the first region providing the program code at a virtual address of 0x1000000, having a size of at least 0x281a6, populated with exactly that amount of content from the file. Meanwhile, we need to put the second region at address 0x1029360, having a size of 0x8068, but only filled with 0x2058 bytes of data. Both regions need to be aligned to addresses that are multiples of 0x1000, but their contents must be available at the stated locations. Such considerations brought up two apparently necessary enhancements to the provision of file content: the masking of content so that undefined areas of each region are populated with zero bytes, this being important in the case of the partially filled data region; the ability to support writes to a region without those writes being propagated to the original file.

The alignment details help to avoid the overlapping of regions, and the matter of populating the regions can be managed in a variety of ways. I found that since file content was already being padded at the extent of a file, I could introduce a variation of the page mapper already used to manage the population of memory pages that would perform such padding at the limits of regions defined within files. For read-only file regions, such a “masked” page mapper would issue a single read-only page containing only zero bytes for any part of a file completely beyond the limits of such regions, thus avoiding the allocation of lots of identical pages. For writable regions that are not to be committed to the actual files, a “copied” page mapper abstraction was introduced, this providing copy-on-write functionality where write accesses cause new memory pages to be allocated and used to retain the modified data.

Some packaging up of the functionality into library routines and abstractions was undertaken, although as things stand more of that still needs to be done. I haven’t even looked into support for dynamic library loading, nor am I handling any need to extend the program stack when that is necessary, amongst other things, and I also need to make the process of creating tasks as simple as a function call and probably also expose the process via IPC in order to have a kind of process server. I still need to get back to addressing the lack of convenient support for the sequential testing of functionality.

But I hope that much of the hard work has now already been done. Then again, I often find myself climbing one particular part of this mountain, thinking that the next part of the ascent will be easier, only to find myself confronted with another long and demanding stretch that brings me only marginally closer to the top! This article is part of a broader consolidation process, along with writing some documentation, and this process will continue with the packaging of this work for the historical record if nothing else.

Conclusions and Reflections

All of this has very much been a learning exercise covering everything from the nuts and bolts of L4Re, with its functions and abstractions, through the design of a component architecture to support familiar, intuitive but hard-to-define filesystem functionality, this requiring a deeper understanding of Unix filesystem behaviour, all the while considering issues of concurrency and resource management that are not necessarily trivial. With so much going on at so many levels, progress can be slow and frustrating. I see that similar topics and exercises are pursued in some university courses, and I am sure that these courses produce highly educated people who are well equipped to go out into the broader world, developing systems like these using far less effort than I seem to be applying.

That leads to the usual question of whether such systems are worth developing when one can just “use Linux” or adopt something already under development and aimed at a particular audience. As I note above, maybe people are routinely developing such systems for proprietary use and don’t see any merit in doing the same thing openly. The problem with such attitudes is that experience with the development of such systems is then not broadly cultivated, the associated expertise and the corresponding benefits of developing and deploying such systems are not proliferated, and the average user of technology only gets benefits from such systems in a limited sense, if they even encounter them at all, and then only for a limited period of time, most likely, before the products incorporating such technologies wear out or become obsolete.

In other words, it is all very well developing proprietary systems and celebrating achievements made decades ago, but having reviewed decades of computing history, it is evident to me that achievements that are not shared will need to be replicated over and over again. That such replication is not cutting-edge development or, to use the odious term prevalent in academia, “novel” is not an indictment of those seeking to replicate past glories: it is an indictment of the priorities of those who commercialised them on every prior occasion. As mundane as the efforts described in this article may be, I would hope that by describing them and the often frustrating journey involved in pursuing them, people may be motivated to explore the development of such systems and that techniques that would otherwise be kept as commercial secrets or solutions to assessment exercises might hopefully be brought to a broader audience.

Over the years, I have had a few things to say about technological change, churn, and the appearance of progress, a few of them touching on the evolution and development of the Python programming language. Some of my articles have probably seemed a bit outspoken, perhaps even unfair. It was somewhat reassuring, then, to encounter the reflections of a longstanding author of Python books and his use of rather stronger language than I think I ever used. It was also particularly reassuring because I apparently complain about things in far too general a way, not giving specific examples of phenomena for anything actionable to be done about them. So let us see whether we can emerge from the other end of this article in better shape than we are at this point in it.

Now, the longstanding author in question is none other than Mark Lutz whose books “Programming Python” and “Learning Python” must surely have been bestsellers for their publisher over the years. As someone who has, for many years, been teaching Python to a broad audience of newcomers to the language and to programming in general, his views overlap with mine about how Python has become increasingly incoherent and overly complicated, as its creators or stewards pursue some kind of agenda of supposed improvement without properly taking into account the needs of the broadest reaches of its user community. Instead, as with numerous Free Software projects, an unscrutable “vision” is used to impose change based on aesthetics and contemporary fashions, unrooted in functional need, by self-appointed authorities who often lack an awareness or understanding of historical precedent or genuine user need.

Such assertions are perhaps less kind to Python’s own developers than they should be. Those choosing to shoehorn new features into Python arguably have more sense of precedent than, say, the average desktop environment developer imitating Apple in what could uncharitably be described as an ongoing veiled audition for a job in Cupertino. Nevertheless, I feel that language developers would be rather more conservative if they only considered what teaching their language to newcomers entails or what effect their changes have on the people who have written code in their language. Am I being unfair? Let us read what Mr Lutz has to say on the matter:

The real problem with Python, of course, is that its evolution is driven by narcissism, not user feedback. That inevitably makes your programs beholden to ever-shifting whims and ever-hungry egos. Such dependencies might have been laughable in the past. In the age of Facebook, unfortunately, this paradigm permeates Python, open source, and the computer field. In fact, it extends well beyond all three; narcissism is a sign of our times.

You won’t find a shortage of similar sentiments on his running commentary of Python releases. Let us, then, take a look at some experiences and try to review such assertions. Maybe I am not being so unreasonable (or impractical) in my criticism after all!

Out in the Field

In a recent job, of which more might be written another time, Python was introduced to people more familiar with languages such as R (which comes across as a terrible language, but again, another time perhaps). It didn’t help that as part of that introduction, they were exposed to things like this:

    def method(self, arg: Dict[Something, SomethingElse]):
        return arg.items()

When newcomers are already having to digest new syntax, new concepts (classes and objects!), and why there is a “self” parameter, unnecessary ornamentation such as the type annotations included in the above, only increases the cognitive burden. It also doesn’t help to then say, “Oh, the type declarations are optional and Python doesn’t really check them, anyway!” What is the student supposed to do with that information? Many years ago now, Java was mocked for confronting its newcomers with boilerplate like this classic:

    public static void main(String[] args)

But exposing things that the student is then directed to ignore is simply doing precisely the same thing for which Java was criticised. Of course, in Python, the above method could simply have been written as follows:

    def method(self, arg):
        return arg.items()

Indeed, for the above method to be valid in the broadest sense, the only constraint on the nature of the “arg” parameter is that it offer an attribute called “items” that can be called with no arguments. By prescriptively imposing a limitation on “arg” as was done above, insisting that it be a dictionary, the method becomes less general and less usable. Moreover, the nature of Python itself is neglected or mischaracterised: the student might believe that only a certain type would be acceptable, just as one might suggest that the author of that code also fails to see that a range of different, conformant kinds of objects could be used with the method. Such practices discourage or conceal polymorphism and generic functionality at a point when the beginner’s mind should be opened to them.

As Mr Lutz puts such things in the context of a different feature introduced in Python 3.5:

To put that another way: unless you’re willing to try explaining a new feature to people learning the language, you just shouldn’t do it.

The tragedy is that Python in its essential form is a fairly intuitive and readable language. But as he also says in the specific context of type annotations:

Thrashing (and rudeness) aside, the larger problem with this proposal’s extensions is that many programmers will code them—either in imitation of other languages they already know, or in a misguided effort to prove that they are more clever than others. It happens. Over time, type declarations will start appearing commonly in examples on the web, and in Python’s own standard library. This has the effect of making a supposedly optional feature a mandatory topic for every Python programmer.

And I can certainly say from observation that in various professional cultures, including academia where my own recent observations were made, there is a persistent phenomenon where people demonstrate “best practice” to show that they as a software development practitioner (or, indeed, a practitioner of anything else related to the career in question) are aware of the latest developments, are able to communicate them to their less well-informed colleagues, and are presumably the ones who should be foremost in anyone’s consideration for any future hiring round or promotion. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm is not always tempered by considered reflection, either on the nature of the supposed innovation itself, or on the consequences its proliferation will have.

Perversely, such enthusiasm, provoked by the continual hustle for funding, positions, publications and reputation, risks causing a trail of broken programs, and yet at the same time, much is made of the need for software development to be done “properly” in academia, that people do research that is reproducible and whose computational elements are repeatable. It doesn’t help that those ambitions must also be squared with other apparent needs such as offering tools and services to others. And the need to offer such things in a robust and secure fashion sometimes has to coexist with the need to offer them in a convenient form, where appropriate. Taking all of these things into consideration is quite the headache.

A Positive Legacy

Amusingly, some have come to realise that Python’s best hope for reproducible research is precisely the thing that Python’s core developers have abandoned – Python 2.7 – and precisely because they have abandoned it. In an article about reproducing old, published results, albeit of a rather less than scientific nature, Nicholas Rougier sought to bring an old program back to life, aiming to find a way of obtaining or recovering the program’s sources, constructing an executable form of the program, and deploying and running that program on a suitable system. To run his old program, written for the Apple IIe microcomputer in Applesoft BASIC, required the use of emulators and, for complete authenticity, modern hardware expansions to transfer the software to floppy disks to run on an original Apple IIe machine.

And yet, the ability to revive and deploy a program developed 32 years earlier was possible thanks to the Apple machine’s status as a mature, well-understood platform with an enthusiastic community developing new projects and products. These initiatives were only able to offer such extensive support for a range of different “retrocomputing” activities because the platform has for a long time effectively been “frozen”. Contrasting such a static target with rapidly evolving modern programming languages and environments, Rougier concluded that “an advanced programming language that is guaranteed not to evolve anymore” would actually be a benefit for reproducible science, that few people use many of the new features of Python 3, and that Python 2.7 could equally be such a “highly fertile ground for development” that the proprietary Applesoft BASIC had proven to be for a whole community of developers and users.

Naturally, no language designer ever wants to be told that their work is finished. Lutz asserts that “a bloated system that is in a perpetual state of change will eventually be of more interest to its changers than its prospective users”, which is provocative but also rings true. CPython (the implementation of Python in the C programming language) has always had various technical deficiencies – the lack of proper multithreading, for instance – but its developers who also happen to be the language designers seem to prefer tweaking the language instead. Other languages have gained in popularity at Python’s expense by seeking to address such deficiencies and to meet the frustrated expectations of Python developers. Or as Lutz notes:

While Python developers were busy playing in their sandbox, web browsers mandated JavaScript, Android mandated Java, and iOS became so proprietary and closed that it holds almost no interest to generalist developers.

In parts of academia familiar with Python, languages like Rust and Julia are now name-dropped, although I doubt that many of those doing the name-dropping realise what they are in for if they decide to write everything in Rust. Meanwhile, Python 2 code is still used, against a backdrop of insistent but often ignored requests from systems administrators for people to migrate code to Python 3 so that newer operating system distributions can be deployed. In other sectors, such migration is meant to be factored into the cost of doing business, but in places like academia where software maintenance generally doesn’t get funding, no amount of shaming or passive-aggressive coercion is magically going to get many programs updated at all.

Of course, we could advocate that everybody simply run their old software in virtual machines or containers, just as was possible with that Applesoft BASIC program from over thirty years ago. Indeed, containerisation is the hot thing in places like academia just as it undoubtedly is elsewhere. But unlike the Apple II community who will hopefully stick with what they know, I have my doubts that all those technological lubricants marketed under the buzzword “containers!” will still be delivering the desired performance decades from now. As people jump from yesterday’s hot solution to today’s and on to tomorrow’s (Docker, with or without root, to Singularity/Apptainer, and on to whatever else we have somehow deserved), just the confusion around the tooling will be enough to make the whole exercise something of an ordeal.

A Detour to the Past

Over the last couple of years, I have been increasingly interested in looking back over the course of the last few decades, back to the time when I was first introduced to microcomputers, and even back beyond that to the age of mainframes when IBM reigned supreme and the likes of ICL sought to defend their niche and to remain competitive, or even relevant, as the industry shifted beneath them. Obviously, I was not in a position to fully digest the state of the industry as a schoolchild fascinated with the idea that a computer could seemingly take over a television set and show text and graphics on the screen, and I was certainly not “taking” all the necessary computing publications to build up a sophisticated overview, either.

But these days, many publications from decades past – magazines, newspapers, academic and corporate journals – are available from sites like the Internet Archive, and it becomes possible to sample the sentiments and mood of the times, frustrations about the state of then-current, affordable technology, expectations of products to come, and so on. Those of us who grew up in the microcomputing era saw an obvious progression in computing technologies: faster processors, more memory, better graphics, more and faster storage, more sophisticated user interfaces, increased reliability, better development tools, and so on. Technologies such as Unix were “the future”, labelled as impending to the point of often being ridiculed as too expensive, too demanding or too complicated, perhaps never to see the limelight after all. People were just impatient: we got there in the end.

While all of that was going on, other trends were afoot at the lowest levels of computing. Computer instruction set architectures had become more complicated as the capabilities they offered had expanded. Although such complexity, broadly categorised using labels such as CISC, had been seen as necessary or at least desirable to be able to offer system implementers a set of convenient tools to more readily accomplish their work, the burden of delivering such complexity risked making products unreliable, costly and late. For example, the National Semiconductor 32016 processor, seeking to muscle in on the territory of Digital Equipment Corporation and its VAX line of computers, suffered delays in getting to market and performance deficiencies that impaired its competitiveness.

Although capable and in some respects elegant, it turned out that these kinds of processing architectures were not necessarily delivering what was actually important, either in terms of raw performance for end-users or in terms of convenience for developers. Realisations were had that some of the complexity was superfluous, that programmers did not use certain instructions often or at all, and that a flawed understanding of programmers’ needs had led to the retention of functionality that did not need to be inscribed in silicon with all the associated costs and risks that this would entail. Instead, simpler, more orthogonal architectures could be delivered that offered instructions that programmers or, crucially, their compilers would actually use. The idea of RISC was thereby born.

As the concept of RISC took off, pursued by the likes of IBM, UCB and Sun, Stanford University and MIPS, Acorn (and subsequently ARM), HP, and even Digital, Intel and Motorola, amongst others, the concept of the workstation became more fully realised. It may have been claimed by some commentator or other that “the personal computer killed the workstation” or words to that effect, but in fact, the personal computer effectively became the workstation during the course of the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century, albeit somewhat delayed by Microsoft’s sluggish delivery of appropriately sophisticated operating systems throughout its largely captive audience.

For a few people in the 1980s, the workstation vision was the dream: the realisation of their expectations for what a computer should do. Although expectations should always be updated to take new circumstances and developments into account, it is increasingly difficult to see the same rate of progress in this century’s decades that we saw in the final decades of the last century, at least in terms of general usability, stability and the emergence of new and useful computational capabilities. Some might well argue that graphics and video processing or networked computing have progressed immeasurably, these certainly having delivered benefits for visualisation, gaming, communications and the provision of online infrastructure, but in other regards, we seem stuck with something very familiar to that of twenty years ago but with increasingly disillusioned developers and disempowered users.

What we might take away from this historical diversion is that sometimes a focus on the essentials, on simplicity, and on the features that genuinely matter make more of a difference than just pressing ahead with increasingly esoteric and baroque functionality that benefits few and yet brings its own set of risks and costs. And we should recognise that progress is largely acknowledged only when it delivers perceptable benefits. In terms of delivering a computer language and environment, this may necessarily entail emphasising the stability and simplicity of the language, focusing instead on remedying the deficiencies of the underlying language technology to give users the kind of progress they might actually welcome.

A Dark Currency

Mark Lutz had intended to stop commentating on newer versions of Python, reflecting on the forces at work that makes Python what it now is:

In the end, the convolution of Python was not a technical story. It was a sociological story, and a human story. If you create a work with qualities positive enough to make it popular, but also encourage it to be changed for a reward paid entirely in the dark currency of ego points, time will inevitably erode the very qualities which made the work popular originally. There’s no known name for this law, but it happens nonetheless, and not just in Python. In fact, it’s the very definition of open source, whose paradigm of reckless change now permeates the computing world.

I also don’t know of a name for such a law of human behaviour, and yet I have surely mentioned such behavioural phenomena previously myself: the need to hustle, demonstrate expertise, audition for some potential job offer, demonstrate generosity through volunteering. In some respects, the cultivation of “open source” as a pragmatic way of writing software collaboratively, marginalising Free Software principles and encouraging some kind of individualistic gift culture coupled to permissive licensing, is responsible for certain traits of what Python has become. But although a work that is intrinsically Free Software in nature may facilitate chaotic, haphazard, antisocial, selfish, and many other negative characteristics in the evolution of that work, it is the social and economic environment around the work that actually promotes those characteristics.

When reflecting on the past, particularly during periods when capabilities were being built up, we can start to appreciate the values that might have been more appreciated at that time than they are now. Python originated at a time when computers in widespread use were becoming capable enough to offer such a higher-level language, one that could offer increased convenience over various systems programming languages whilst building on top of the foundations established by those languages. With considerable effort having been invested in such foundations, a mindset seemed to persist, at least in places, that such foundations might be enduring and be good for a long time.

An interesting example of such attitudes arose at a lower level with the development of the Alpha instruction set architecture. Digital, having responded ineffectively to its competitive threats, embraced the RISC philosophy and eventually delivered a processor range that could be used to support its existing product line-up, emphasising performance and longevity through a “15- to 25-year design horizon” that attempted to foresee the requirements of future systems. Sadly, Digital made some poor strategic decisions, some arguably due to Microsoft’s increasing influence over the company’s strategy, and after a parade of acquisitions, Alpha fell under the control of HP who sacrificed it, along with its own RISC architecture, to commit to Intel’s dead-end Itanium architecture. I suppose this illustrates that the chaos of “open source” is not the only hazard threatening stability and design for longevity.

Such long or distant horizons demand that newer developments remain respectful to the endeavours that have made them possible. Such existing and ongoing endeavours may have their flaws, but recognising and improving those flaws is more constructive and arguably more productive than tearing everything down and demanding that everything be redone to accommodate an apparently new way of thinking. Sadly, we see a lot of the latter these days, but it goes beyond a lack of respect for precedent and achievement, reflecting broader tendencies in our increasingly stressed societies. One such tendency is that of destructive competition, the elimination of competitors, and the pursuit of monopoly. We might be used to seeing such things in the corporate sphere – the likes of Microsoft wanting to be the only ones who provide the software for your computer, no matter where you buy it – but people have a habit of imitating what they see, especially when the economic model for our societies increasingly promotes the hustle for work and the need to carve out a lucrative niche.

So, we now see pervasive attitudes such as the pursuit of the zero-sum game. Where the deficiencies of a technology lead its users to pursue alternatives, defensiveness in the form of utterances such as “no need to invent another language” arises. Never mind that the custodians of the deficient technology – in this case, Python, of course – happily and regularly offer promotional consideration to a company who openly tout their own language for mobile development. Somehow, the primacy of the Python language is a matter for its users to bear, whereas another rule applies amongst its custodians. That is another familiar characteristic of human behaviour, particularly where power and influence accumulates.

And so, we now see hostility towards anything being perceived as competition, even if it is merely an independent endeavour undertaken by someone wishing to satisfy their own needs. We see intolerance for other solutions, but we also see a number of other toxic behaviours on display: alpha-dogging, personality worship and the cultivation of celebrity. We see chest-puffing displays of butchness about Important Matters like “security”. And, of course, the attitude to what went before is the kind of approach that involves boiling the oceans so that it may be populated by precisely the right kind of fish. None of this builds on or complements what is already there, nor does it deliver a better experience for the end-user. No wonder people say that they are jealous of colleagues who are retiring.

All these things make it unappealing to share software or even ideas with others. Fortunately, if one does not care about making a splash, one can just get on with things that are personally interesting and ignore all the “negativity from ignorant, opinionated blowhards”. Although in today’s hustle culture, this means also foregoing the necessary attention that might prompt anyone to discover your efforts and pay you to do such work. On the actual topic that has furnished us with so many links to toxic behaviour, and on the matter of the venue where such behaviour is routine, I doubt that I would want my own language-related efforts announced in such a venue.

Then again, I seem to recall that I stopped participating in that particular venue after one discussion had a participant distorting public health observations by the likes of Hans Rosling to despicably indulge in poverty denial. Once again, broader social, economic and political influences weigh heavily on our industry and communities, with people exporting their own parochial or ignorant views globally, and in the process corrupting and undermining other people’s societies, oblivious to the misery it has already caused in their own. Against this backdrop, simple narcissism is perhaps something of a lesser concern.

At the End of the Tunnel

I suppose I promised some actionable observations at the start of the article, so what might they be?

Respect Users and Investments

First of all, software developers should be respectful towards the users of their software. Such users lend validation to that software, encourage others to use it, and they potentially make it possible for the developers to work on it for a living. Their use involves an investment that, if written off by the developers, is costly for everyone concerned.

And no, the users’ demands for that investment to be protected cannot be disregarded as “entitlement”, even if they paid nothing to acquire the software, at least if the developers are happy to enjoy all the other benefits of the software’s proliferation. As is often said, power and influence bring responsibility. Just as democratically elected politicians have a responsibility towards everyone they represent, regardless of whether those people voted for them or not, software developers have a duty of care towards all of their users, even if it is merely to step out of the way and to let the users take the software in its own direction without seeking to frustrate them as we saw when Python 2 was cast aside.

Respond to User Needs Constructively

Developers should also be responsive to genuine user needs. If you believe all the folklore about the “open source” way, it should have been precisely people’s own genuine needs that persuaded them to initiate their own projects in the first place. It is entirely possible that a project may start with one kind of emphasis and demand one kind of skills only to evolve towards another emphasis or to require other skills. With Python, much of the groundwork was laid in the 1990s, building an interpreter and formulating a capable language. But beyond that initial groundwork, the more pressing challenges lay outside the language design domain and went beyond the implementation of a simple interpreter.

Improved performance and concurrency, both increasingly expected by users, required the application of other skills that might not have been present in the project. And yet, the elaboration of the language continued, with the developers susceptible to persuasion by outsiders engaging in “alpha-dogging” or even insiders with an inferiority complex, being made to feel that the language was not complete or even adequate since it lacked features from the pet languages of those outsiders or of the popular language of the day. Development communities should welcome initiatives to improve their projects in ways that actually benefit the users, and they should resist the urge to muscle in on such initiatives by seeking to demonstrate that they have the necessary solutions when their track record would indicate otherwise. (Or worse still, by reframing user needs in terms of their own narrow agenda as if to say, “Here is what you are really asking for.” Another familiar trait of the “visionary” desktop developer.)

Respect Other Solutions

Developers and commentators more generally should accept and respect the existence of other technologies and solutions. Just because they have their own favourite solution does not de-legitimise something they have just been made aware of. Maybe it is simply not meant for them. After all, not everything that happens in this reality is part of a performance exclusively for any one person’s benefit, despite what some people appear to think. And the existence of other projects doing much the same thing is not necessarily “wasted effort”: another concept introduced from some cult of economics or other.

It is entirely possible to provide similar functionality in different ways, and the underlying implementations may lend those different projects different characteristics – portability, adaptability, and so on – even if the user sees largely the same result on their screen. Maybe we do want to encourage different efforts even for fundamental technologies or infrastructure, not because anyone likes to “waste effort”, but because it gives the systems we build a level of redundancy and resilience. And maybe some people just work better with certain other people. We should let them, as opposed to forcing them to fit in with tiresome, exploitative and time-wasting development cultures, to suffer rudeness and general abuse, simply to go along with an exercise that props up some form of corporate programme of minimal investment in the chosen solution of industry and various pundits.

Develop for the Long Term and for Stability

Developers should make things that are durable so that they may be usable for many years to come. Or they should at least expect that people may want to use them years or even decades from now. Just because something is old does not mean it is bad. Much of what we use today is based on technology that is old, with much of that technology effectively coming of age decades ago. We should be able to enjoy the increased performance of our computers, not have it consumed by inefficient software that drives the hardware and other software into obsolescence. Technological fads come and go (and come back again): people in the 1990s probably thought that virtual reality would be pervasive by now, but experience should permit us to reflect and to recognise that some things were (and maybe always will be) bad ideas and that we shouldn’t throw everything overboard to pander to them, only to regret doing so later.

We live in a world where rapid and uncomfortable change has been normalised, but where consumerism has been promoted as the remedy. Perhaps some old way of doing something mundane doesn’t work any more – buying something, interacting with public agencies, fulfilling obligations, even casting votes in some kinds of elections – perhaps because someone has decided that money can be saved (and, of course, soon wasted elsewhere) if it can be done “digitally” from now on. To keep up, you just need a smartphone, or a newer smartphone, with an “app”, or the new “app”, and a subscription to a service, and another one. And so on. All of that “works” for people as long as they have the necessarily interest, skills, time, and money to spend.

But as the last few years have shown, it doesn’t take much to disrupt these unsatisfactory and fragile arrangements. Nobody advocating fancy “digital” solutions evidently considered that people would not already have everything they need to access their amazing creations. And when, as they say, neither love nor money can get you the gadgets you need, it doesn’t even matter how well-off you are: suddenly you get a downgrade in experience to a level that, as a happy consumer, you probably didn’t even know still existed, even if it is still the reality for whole sections of our societies. We have all seen how narrow the margins are between everything apparently being “just fine” and there being an all-consuming crisis, both on a global level and, for many, on a personal level, too.

Recognise Responsibilities to Others

Change can be a positive thing if it carries everyone along and delivers actual progress. Meanwhile, there are those who embrace disruption as a form of change, claiming it to be a form of progress, too, but that form of change is destructive, harmful and exclusionary. It should not be a surprise that prominent advocates of a certain political movement advocate such disruptive change: for them, it doesn’t matter how many people suffer by the ruinous change they have inflicted on everyone as long as they are the ones to benefit; everyone else can wait fifty years or so to see some kind of consolation for the things taken from them, apparently.

As we deliver technology to others, we should not be the ones deepening any misery already experienced by imposing needless and costly change. We should be letting people catch up with the state of technology and allowing them to be comfortable with it. We should invest in long-term solutions that address people’s needs, and we should refuse to be shamed into playing the games of opportunists and profiteers who ridicule anything old or familiar in favour of what they happen to be promoting today. We should demand that people’s investments in hardware and software be protected, that they are not effectively coerced into constantly buying new things and seeing their their living standards diminished in other ways, with such consumption burdening our planet’s ecosystem and resources.

Just as we all experience that others have power over us, so we might recognise the power we have over other people. And just as we might expect others to consider our interests, so we might consider the interests of those who have to put up with our decisions. Maybe, in the end, all I am doing is asking for people to show some consideration for the experiences of other people, that their lives not be made any harder than they might already be. Is that really too much to ask? Is that so hard to understand?

Although I have tried to maintain an interest in computing hardware over the last two years or so, both contemporary and somewhat older technologies, I haven’t really had much time or energy to devote to electronics projects. However, I was becoming increasingly bothered by my existing VGA signal generation project taking up space on a couple of solderless breadboards, demanding lots of jumper wires, and generally not helping me organise and consolidate my collection of electronics-related acquisitions, components, and so on. I was also feeling a bit bad for not moving the VGA project to the next step, which is what I had virtually promised to do. Having acquired a new computer in 2020 but not having really looked at KiCad since migrating to the new machine, I finally picked up the courage to set out translating my existing notes into a proper circuit diagram, reacquainting myself with KiCad’s peculiarities, and then translating this into an actual board layout.

My priorities for a circuit board were to support signal generation and programming, gathering together all the different passive components associated with signal generation – the resistors for combining colour intensity levels – plus all the components associated with programming the microcontroller – more resistors – and putting them on the board with a socket for the microcontroller. Unlike boards trying to replicate the Arduino experience, this board would not seek to offer programming facilities itself: that would remain the job of another board, with the Arduino Duemilanove already doing this job adequately under the control of the Nanu Nanu software. Headers would therefore expose the programming pins for connection to the Arduino or other device.

Nor would the board offer its own VGA connector for the VGA signals: I already have a VGA connector terminal block, and mounting a DE-15 connector on a board raises issues of selecting an appropriate component, defining a usable component footprint, making room on the board for it, and ensuring that the connector is securely attached without risking stress on the board or solder joints. Besides, the idea was to make use of my existing parts, and by retaining use of the terminal block, I could just use a header for the VGA signal outputs which would also require a modest amount of space. I envisaged that any future solution with a proper socket for a VGA cable might well involve a separate board securely mounted to a case, with the case taking the strain of cable insertions and removals, and with cables connecting this separate board to the board being designed here.

One issue when making a board that I could easily imagine stalling the process is that of the size and shape of any given board. With something resembling a miniature computing system, one might get tempted by selecting a broadly-adopted circuit board profile like PC/104 or one of the ITX family, or perhaps leveraging the deluge of Raspberry Pi cases available for one of those products (despite their variations and incompatibilities). However, my choice was practically made for me: I already had one Arduino case that I hadn’t used for anything, and it seemed to me that the traditional Arduino board profile was appropriately sized and would not be particularly inconvenient to adopt, although the actual physical characteristics were not adequately defined, leaving it to others to do the work of documentation that should have been done by the Arduino initiative right from the start. (There are subtle differences between Duemilanove models that have actually made some cases incompatible with some versions of that board, so this was a real problem.)

Anyway, with the physical and electrical constraints mostly figured out, I laid out the board, put headers in places I considered sensible enough, not aiming for Arduino shield compatibility since I needed more flexibility than that would demand. I also wanted to add support for various other useful features including some that I had already tested, such as UART communication, together with some I had not been able to adequately investigate, such as the driving of peripherals (or the microcontroller itself) over the parallel bus and USB connectivity. The latter involved messing around with the differential pair routing features of KiCad, but it is entirely possible that such features are largely superfluous at the transmission frequencies this board would end up using. After much checking, rechecking, agonising, and so on, I uploaded the board design to OSHPark and placed an order.

Several weeks later, I received the boards in the post, thankfully without any customs fees or other charges. In the meantime, I had also ordered components that I needed from a supplier in the UK, Technobots, who happen to sell logic chips and other things that suppliers targeting the “maker” community tend not to bother selling. Thankfully also in this case, the components arrived without incurring fees and charges, although I had kept the value of my order fairly low. In Norway, the industrial lobby hate to see people importing things, often taking the tone that people should buy locally produced goods, but since nobody makes these things here, anyone “local” that sells them has to import them, and the result is often just the cheapest stuff at ridiculously high prices and some middlemen making all the money, rather than anyone earning a decent living out of actually producing anything. But anyway.

The boards themselves were well made, as I have seen before, although I was disappointed with the “tabs” around the edge. When boards get made, people will tell you that they are all put on a big panel together and that they therefore need to be attached to each other somehow. The manufacturer will then typically spell out that apart from separating the boards by snapping them apart, they don’t do any further finishing work on the edges because we, the customers, aren’t paying for that level of service. However, I don’t remember the remnants of these inter-board connections – the tabs – being so awkward on previous boards from OSHPark. If I had to do anything before, I’m sure it just involved some gentle trimming, but these needed the application of glasspaper to grind down the tabs to be level with the actual board edge. Given the sub-millimetre tolerances involved in board fabrication, I find it perverse that such finishing would fall to someone – me or someone in the factory – to do this by hand.

The fabricated boards, with the annoying “tabs” visible around the edges.

Having tested the continuity between different pads using a simple power plus LED plus resistor arrangement, all that remained was to get the soldering equipment out and to build myself up to the usually arduous task of fitting all the headers, resistors, capacitors and the socket. This was something of a trial in itself, but I eventually remembered the various tricks needed to coerce my soldering iron to apply the solder in a barely decent way.

The finished board connected to the VGA terminal block and Arduino Duemilanove.

One thing I realised very quickly was that I had chosen the wrong component footprint for the resistors. In navigating the rather unreadable list provided by the inflexible component assignment dialogue within KiCad, I had chosen footprints with the pads not being sufficiently separated for the resistors I happen to have (and ones that are likely to be sold for these purposes). So, I had to raise the resistors up from the board and tuck the leads under them slightly. Despite the additional height occupied by the resistors, the capacitors and headers are already rather tall and so this workaround causes no other problems. I also discovered that placing the resistors in the compact arrangement shown, while very neat and tidy, made all the unsoldered leads rather crowded on the underside of the board and rather increased the risk of accidental solder bridging between components, at least with my soldering technique. The capacitors had appropriate footprints, however, and were less of a challenge.

What followed was another trial, mostly caused by a simple wiring up error, and lots of troubleshooting involving the programming software and circuits both on this board and on the breadboard, chasing down a non-existent programming issue. The programming circuit was actually fine, and the programming was actually being performed as normal, but in maintaining a level of doubt about the outcome of the exercise, I had run the verification operation of the programming software and had seen that it was consistently complaining about a programming error. Worryingly, this error now seemed to occur both on the manufactured board and on the breadboard, for both a microcontroller that I had used before and a completely unused one. I started to test and investigate different versions of the programming software to see if any regressions had occurred.

Eventually, I realised that the error was related to the last thing the software would do when programming the microcontroller and was related to setting a configuration register. Ignoring this and reminding myself of the UART configuration, I sought to test the example program demonstrating UART communication and found, eventually, that it worked on the breadboard. It also worked on the manufactured board, too, raising my confidence slightly. And then, while perusing my previous blog post, I realised that I had connected the VGA sync signal pins the wrong way round! Programming the VGA example program and fixing the wiring finally got me to where I should have been to begin with.

The board generating a VGA signal via a terminal block and cable, with the Arduino supplying power and acting as programmer.

The arrangement of boards required here is a bit cumbersome, although the Arduino could be replaced by a simple 3.3V power source if the appropriate software has already been programmed into the PIC32 microcontroller. As noted above, an auxiliary board could provide a VGA socket for a cable and thus eliminate the bulky terminal connector.

The three-board arrangement of VGA terminal block, VGA signal board, and Arduino Duemilanove.

As far as using an existing Arduino case is concerned, there are some obvious limitations and possibilities for improvement and refinement. The size and shape of the manufactured board is compatible with the case I happen to have, but where an Arduino shield would be stacked on top of the Duemilanove directly, this board necessitates that the connections be routed using wires or cables between the Arduino’s analogue header and the programming header on this board. Having mounted female headers on this board, this involves routing cables around the edge of the board, and the lack of clearance between the Arduino’s headers and the underside of this board means that there is not enough space to use jumper wires. Fortunately, breadboard jumper cables can do this job, if not entirely elegantly.

The board and the Duemilanove in a case, with the cables routing programming and power signals between the boards.

Introducing a degree of shield compatibility might be a solution to such problems, but perhaps I should not be too hard on myself. The new computer I bought in 2020 has its own compartment for cables, and this compartment is rammed full of seemingly needless, bulky cabling, presumably demonstrating the designers’ aptitude for cable management as they neglected other basic functionality one would expect from a computer case in the third decade of the twenty-first century.

There are other modifications that I might make in a second version of this board. Challenged by the layout issues, I neglected to realise that if the VGA signal resistors are fitted, some of the parallel bus pins will have their own signals mixed with others: I should have realised this and specified diodes for the various signal lines concerned. Still, with spare boards and another microcontroller to play with, I could possibly just make up a board without those resistors if I wanted to experiment with parallel mode. Since this would most likely involve driving a screen, it wouldn’t make sense to try and support that and VGA output on the same board, although I could imagine some kind of switching solution disabling one and enabling the other as appropriate.

In reflection, the outcome is satisfactory. I did spend rather too long designing, building and – especially – troubleshooting the board, and there are definitely things that are obviously wrong with it, but it has now allowed me to dismantle the original breadboard circuit, free up some jumper wires and components, and to put all of those things away properly. It has also helped me become familiar with KiCad once again, encouraged me to document more schematics, and opened the door to doing more circuit design in the future. In any case, I hope that this was a somewhat interesting view into the realisation of a long overdue project.

It was interesting to see an apparently recent article “On the Sustainability of Free Software” published by the FSFE in the context of the Upcycling Android campaign. I have been advocating for sustainable Free Software for some time. When I wasn’t posting articles about my own Python-like language, electronics projects or microkernel-based system development, it seems that I was posting quite a few about sustainable software, hardware and technology like these:

• “On Not Liking Computers” (2016)
• “Sustainable Computing” (2018)
• “An Absence of Strategy?” (2019)

So, I hardly feel it necessary to go back through much of the same material again. Frustratingly, very little has improved over the years, it would seem: some new initiatives emerge, and such things always manage to excite some people, but the same old underlying causes of a general lack of sustainability remain, these including access to affordable, long-lasting and supportable hardware, and the properly funded development of Free Software and the hardware that would run it.

Of course, I wouldn’t even be bothered to write this if I didn’t feel that there might be some positive insights to share, and recent events have prompted me to do so. Hopefully, I can formulate them concisely and constructively in the following paragraphs.

The Open Hardware Crisis

Alright, so that was a provocative heading – hardly positive or constructive – and with so much hardware hacking (of the good kind) going on these days, it might be tempting to ask “what crisis?” Well, evidently, some people think there has been a crisis around the certification of hardware by the Free Software Foundation: that the Respects Your Freedom criteria don’t really help get hardware designed and made that would support (or be supported by) Free Software; that the criteria fail to recognise practical limitations with some elements of hardware, imposing rigid and wasteful measures that fail to enhance the rights of users and that might even impair the longevity and repairability of devices.

A lot of the hardware we rely on nowadays depends on features that cannot easily be supported by Free Software. The system I use has integrated graphics that require proprietary firmware from AMD to work in any half-decent way, as do many processors and interfacing chips, some not even working in any real way at all without it. Although FPGA technology has become more accessible and has invigorated the field of open hardware, there are still considerable challenges around the availability of Free Software toolchains for those kinds of devices. It is also not completely clear how programmable logic devices intersect with the realm of Free Software, either, as far as I can tell. Should people expect the corresponding source code and the means to generate a “bitstream” for the FPGAs in a system? I would think so, given appropriate licensing, but I am not familiar enough with the legal and regulatory constraints to allow me to expect it to be so.

The discussion around this may sound like a storm in a teacup, especially if you do not follow the appropriate organisations, figures, and their mailing lists (and I recommend saving your time and not bothering to, either), but it also sounds rather like tactics have prevailed over strategy. The fact is that without hardware being made to run Free Software, there isn’t really going to be much of a Free Software movement. So, instead of recommending increasingly ancient phones as “ethical gifts” or hoping that the latest crop of “Linux phones” will deliver a package that will not only run Linux but also prove to be usable as a phone, maybe a move away from consumerism is advised. Consumerism, of course, being the tendency to solve every problem by choosing the “best deal” the market happens to be offering today.

What the likes of the FSF need to do is to invest in hardware platforms that are amenable to the deployment of Free Software. This does not necessarily mean totally rejecting hardware if it has unfortunate characteristics such as proprietary firmware, particularly if there is no acceptable alternative, but the initiative has to start somewhere, however imperfect that somewhere might be. Much as we would all like to spend thousands of dollars on hardware that meets some kind of liberty threshold, most of us don’t have that kind of money and would accept some kind of compromise (just as we have to do most of the time, anyway), especially if we felt there was a chance to make up for any deficiencies later on. Trying to start from an impossible position means that there is no “here and now”, never mind “later on”.

Sadly, several attempts at open hardware platforms have struggled and could not be sustained. Some of these were criticised for having some supposed flaw or other that apparently made them unacceptable to the broader Free Software community, and yet they could have led to products that might have remedied such supposed flaws. Meanwhile, consumerist instincts had all the money chasing the latest projects, and yet here we are in 2022, barely any better off than we were in 2012. Had the FSF and company actually supported hardware projects that sought to support their own vision, as opposed to just casually endorsing projects and hoping they came good, we might be in better place by now.

The Ethical Software Crisis

One depressingly recurring theme is the lack of support given to Free Software developers and to Free Software development, even as billion-to-trillion-dollar corporations bank substantial profits on the back of Free Software. As soon as some random developer deletes his JavaScript package from some repository or other, or even switches it out for something that breaks the hyperactive “continuous integration” of hundreds or thousands of projects, everyone laments the fragility of “the system” and embeds that XKCD cartoon with the precarious structure that you’ve all presumably seen. Business-as-usual, however, is soon restored.

Many of the remedies for overworked, underpaid, burned-out developers have the same, familiar consumerist or neoliberal traits. Trait number one is, of course, to let a million projects bloom, carefully selecting the winners and discarding any that fail to keep up with the constant technological churn that also plagues our societies. Beyond that, things like bounties and donations are proposed, and funding platforms helpfully materialise to facilitate the transaction, themselves mostly funded not by bounties and donations (other than the cut of other people’s bounties and donations, of course) but by venture capital money. Because who would actually want to be going from one “gig” to the next when they could actually get a salary?

And it is revealing that organisations engaging in Free Software development tend to have an enthusiasm not for hiring actual developers but for positions like “community manager”, frequently with the responsibility for encouraging contributions from that desirable stream of eager volunteers. Alongside this, funding is sought from a variety of sources, some of whom being public institutions or progressive organisations perhaps sensing a growing crisis and feeling that something should be done. Other sources are perhaps more about doing “philanthropic work” on behalf of wealthy patrons, although I think I would think twice about taking money from people whose wealth has been built on the back of facilitating psychological warfare on entire populations, undermining public health policies and climate change mitigation, enabling inter-ethnic violence and hate generally, and providing a broadcasting platform for extremists. But as they say, beggars can’t be choosers, right?

It may, of course, be argued that big companies are big employers of Free Software developers. Certainly, lots of people seem to work on Free Software projects in companies like, ahem, Blue Hat. And some of that corporate development does deliver usable software, or at least it helps to mitigate the usability issues of the software being produced elsewhere, maybe in another part of the very same corporation. Large, stable organisations may well be the key to providing developers with secure incomes and the space to focus on producing high-quality, well-designed, long-lasting software. Then again, such organisations sometimes exhibit ethical deficiencies in their own collective activities by seeking to aggressively protect revenue streams by limiting interoperability, reduce costs through offshoring, assert patents against others, and impose needless technological change on their customers and the broader market simply to achieve a temporary competitive advantage.

Free Software organisations should be advocating for quality, stable employment for software developers. For too long, Free Software has been perceived as something for nothing where “everybody else” pays, even as organisations and individuals happily pay substantial sums for hardware and for proprietary software. Deferring to “the market” does nobody any good in the end: “the market” will only pay for what it absolutely has to, and businesses doing nicely selling solutions (who might claim that “the market” works for them and should be good enough for everyone) all too frequently rely on practically invisible infrastructure projects that they get for free. It arguably doesn’t matter if it would be public institutions, as opposed to businesses, ending up hiring people as long as they get decent contracts and aren’t at risk of all being laid off because some right-wing government wants to slash taxes for rich people, as tends to happen every few years.

And Free Software organisations should be advocating for ethical software development. Although the public mood in general may lag rather too far behind that of more informed commentary, the awareness many of us have of the substantial ethical concerns around various applications of computing – artificial intelligence, social media/manipulation platforms, surveillance, “cryptocurrencies”, and so on – requires us to uphold our principles, to recognise where our own principles fall short, and to embrace other causes that seek to safeguard the rights of individuals, the health of our societies, and the viability of our planet as our home.

The Accessible Infrastructure Crisis

Some of that ethical software development would also recognise the longevity we hope our societies may ultimately have. And yet we have every reason to worry about our societies becoming less equitable, less inclusive, and less accessible. The unquestioning adoption of technology-driven, consumerist solutions has led to many of the interactions us individuals have with institutions and providers of infrastructure being mediated by random companies who have inserted themselves into every kind of transaction they have perceived as highly profitable. Meanwhile, technologists have often embraced change through newer and newer technology for its own sake, not for the sake of actual progress or for making life easier.

While devices like smartphones have been liberating for many, providing capabilities that one could only have dreamed of only a few decades ago, they also introduce the risk of imposing relationships and restrictions on individuals to the point where those unable to acquire or use technological devices may find themselves excluded from public facilities, commercial transactions, and even voting in elections or other processes of participatory democracy. Such conditions may be the result of political ideology, the outsourcing and offshoring of supposedly non-essential activities, and the trimming back of the public sector, with any consequences, conflicts of interest, and even corrupt dealings being ignored or deliberately overlooked, dismissed as “nothing that would happen here”.

The risk to Free Software and to our societies is that we as individuals no longer collectively control our infrastructure through our representatives, nor do we control the means of interacting with it, the adoption of technology, or the pace such technology is introduced and obsoleted. When the suggestion to problems using supposedly public infrastructure is to “get a new phone” or “upgrade your computer”, we are actually being exploited by corporate interests and their facilitators. Anyone participating in such a cynical deployment of technology must, I suppose, reconcile their sense of a job well done with the sight of their fellow citizens being obstructed, impoverished or even denied their rights.

Although Free Software organisations have tried to popularise unencumbered sources of mobile software and to promote techniques and technologies to lengthen the lifespan of mobile devices, more fundamental measures are required to reverse the harmful course taken by many of our societies. Some of these measures are political or social, and some are technological. All of them are necessary.

We must reject the notion that progress is dependent on technological consumption. While computers and computing devices have managed to keep getting faster, despite warnings that such trends would meet their demise one way or another, improvements in their operational effectiveness in many regards have been limited. We may be able to view higher quality video today than we could ten years ago, and user interfaces may be pushing around many more pixels, but the results of our interactions are not necessarily more substantial. Yet, the ever-increasing demands of things like Web browsers means that systems become obsolete and are replaced with newer, faster systems to do exactly the same things in any qualitative sense. This wastefulness, burdening individuals with needless expenditure and burdening the environment with even more consumption, must stop.

We must demand interoperability and openness with regard to public infrastructure and even commercial platforms. It should be forbidden to insist that specific products be used to interact with public services and amenities or with commercial operators. The definition and adoption of genuinely open standards would be central to any such demands, and we would need to insist that such standards must encompass every aspect of such interactions and activities, without permitting companies to extend them in incompatible, proprietary ways that would deliberately undermine such initiatives.

We must insist that individuals never be under any obligation to commercial interests when interacting with public infrastructure: that their obligations are only to the public bodies concerned. And, similarly, we should insist that when dealing with companies, they may not also require us to enter into ongoing commercial relationships with other companies, purely as a condition of any transaction. It is unacceptable, for example, that individuals require such a relationship with a foreign technology company purely to gain access to essential services or to conduct purchases or similar transactions.

Ideas for Remedies

In conclusion, we need to care about technological freedoms – our choices of hardware and software, things like online privacy, and all that – but we also need to recognise and care about the social, economic and political conditions that threaten such freedoms. We can’t expect to set up a nice Free Software computing system and to use it forever when forces in society compel us to upgrade every few years. Nor can we expect people to make the hardware for such systems, let alone at an affordable price, when technological indulgence drives the sophistication of hardware to levels where investment in open hardware production is prohibitively costly. And we can’t expect to use our Free Software systems if consumerist and/or corrupt choices sacrifice interoperability and pander to entrenched commercial interests.

The vision here, if we can even call it that, is that we might embrace the “essential” nature of our computing needs and thus embrace hardware with adequate levels of sophistication that could, if everyone were honest with themselves, get the job done just fine. Years ago, people used to say how “Linux is great because it works on older systems”, but these days you apparently cannot even install some distributions with less than 1GB of RAM, and Blue Hat is apparently going to put all the bloat of a “modern” Web browser into its installer. And once we have installed our system, do we really need a video playing in the background of a Web page as we navigate a simple list of train times? Do we even need something as sophisticated as a Web browser for that at all?

Embracing mature, proven, reliable, well-understood hardware would help hardware designers to get their efforts right, and if hardware standards and modularity were adopted, there would still be the chance to introduce improvements and enhancements. Such hardware characteristics would also help with the software support: instead of rushing the long, difficult journey of introducing support for poorly documented components from unhelpful manufacturers eager to retire those components and to start making future products, the aim would be to support components with long commercial lifespans whose software support is well established and hopefully facilitated by the manufacturer. And with suitably standardised or modular hardware, creativity and refinement could be directed towards other aspects of the hardware which are often neglected or underestimated such as ergonomics and the other aspects of traditional product design.

With stable hardware, there might be more software options, too. Although many would propose “just putting Linux on it” for any given device, one need only consider the realm of smartphones to realise that such convenient answers are not necessarily the most obviously correct ones, particularly for certain definitions of “Linux”. Instead of choosing Linux because it probably supports the hardware, only to find that as much time is spent fixing that support and swimming against the currents of upstream development as would have been spent implementing that support elsewhere, other systems with more desirable properties could be considered and deployed. We might even encourage different systems to share functionality, instead of wrapping it up in a specific framework that resists portability. Such systems would also aspire to avoid the churn throughout the GNU-plus-Linux-plus-graphical-stack-of-the-day familiar to many of us, potentially allowing us to use familiar software over much longer periods than we have generally been allowed to before, retrocomputing platforms aside.

But to let all of this happen and to offer a viable foundation, we must also ensure that such systems can be used in the wider world. Otherwise, this would merely be an exercise in retrocomputing. Now, there is an argument that there are plenty of existing standards that might facilitate this vision, and perhaps going along with the famous saying about standards (the good thing being that there are so many to choose from), we might wish to avoid the topic of yet another widely-referenced XKCD cartoon by actually adopting some of them instead of creating more of them. That is not to say that we would necessarily want to go along with the full breadth of some standards, however. XML deliberately narrowed down SGML to be a more usable technology, despite its own reputation for complexity. Since some standards were probably “front-run” by companies wishing to elevate their own products, within which various proposed features were already implemented, thus forcing their competitors to play catch up, it is entirely possible that various features are superfluous or frivolous.

There have already been attempts to simplify the Web or to make a simpler Web-like platform, Gemini being one of them, and there are persuasive arguments that such technologies should be considered as separate from the traditional Web. After all, the best of intentions in delivering a simple, respectful experience can easily be undermined by enthusiasm for the latest frameworks and fashions, or by the insistence that less than respectful techniques and technologies – user surveillance, to take one example – be introduced to “help understand” or “better serve” users. A distinct technology might offer easy ways of resisting such temptations by simply failing to support them conveniently, but the greater risk is that it might not even get adopted significantly at all.

New standards might well be necessary, but revising and reforming existing ones might well be more productive, and there is merit in focusing standards on the essentials. After all, people used the Web for real work twenty years ago, too. And some would argue that today’s Web is just reimplementing the client-server paradigm but with JavaScript on the front end, grinding your CPU, with application-specific communications conducted between the browser and the server. Such communications will, for the most part, not be specified and be prone to changing and breaking, interoperability being the last thing on everybody’s mind. Formalising such communications, and adopting technologies more appropriate to each device and to each user, might actually be beneficial: instead of megabytes of JavaScript passing across the network and through the browser, the user would get to choose how they access such services, which programs they might use, rather than having “an experience” foisted upon them.

Such an approach would actually return us to something close to the original vision of the Web. But standards surely have to be seen as the basis of the Free Software we might hope to use, and as the primary vehicle for the persuasion of others. Public institutions and businesses care about reaching the biggest possible audience, and this has brought us to a rather familiar sight: the anointment of two viable players in a particular market and no others. Back in the 1990s, the two chosen ones in desktop computing were Microsoft and Apple, the latter kept afloat by the former so as to avoid being perceived as a de-facto monopoly and thereby avoiding being subject to proper regulation. Today, Apple and Google are the gatekeepers in mobile computing, with even Microsoft being an unwelcome complication.

Such organisations want to offer solutions that supposedly reach “the most users”, will happily commission “apps” for the big two players (and Microsoft, sometimes, because habits and favouritism die hard), and will probably shy away from suggesting other solutions, labelling them as confusing or unreliable, mostly because they just don’t want to care: their job is done, the boxes ticked, more effort gives no more reward. But standards offer the possibility of reaching every user, of meeting legal accessibility requirements, and potentially allowing such organisations to delegate the provision of solutions to their favourite entity: “the market”. Naturally, some kind of validation of standards compliance would probably be required, but this need not be overly restrictive nor the business of every last government department or company.

So, I suppose a combination of genuinely open standards facilitating Free Software and accessible public and private services, with users able to adopt and retain open and long-lasting hardware, might be a glimpse of some kind of vision. How people might make good enough money to be able to live decently is another question entirely, but then again, perhaps cultivating simpler, durable, sustainable infrastructure might create opportunities in the development of products that use it, allowing people to focus on improving those products, that infrastructure and the services they collectively deliver as opposed to chasing every last fad and fashion, running faster and faster and yet having the constant feeling of falling behind. As many people seem to experience in many other aspects of their lives.

Well, I hope the positivity was in there somewhere!