It's so strange to see this get posted every year and have people respond, "Oh, yes, systems software research is still irrelevant," despite all the radical changes in the last 22 years. The problem Pike pointed out in this talk got so, so dramatically solved, it's just unbelievable how solved it is. Consider the "high-end workstation" slide:

01990 software: Unix, X-Windows, Emacs, TCP/IP

02000 software: Unix, X-Windows, Emacs, TCP/IP, Netscape

02022 software: Android, Unix, X-Windows, SurfaceFlinger, Wayland, Emacs, VS Code, TCP/IP, IPv6, ubiquitous TLS, Chromium, Firefox, mpv, V8, Docker, Kubernetes, Dark Souls, SQLite, Hadoop

01990 language: C, C++

02000 language: C, C++, Java, Perl (a little)

02022 language: Python, C, Java, C++, C#, JS, PHP, Objective-C, Golang, Sawzall

The top 30 items on the HN home page right now are about an open-source NewRelic alternative; a library for RPC from the browser to node.js; a UX design curriculum; photosynthesis; this talk; a bash one-liner; an in-browser ping-time tester; using org-mode for to-do lists in Emacs; noise suppression using wasm in Jitsi Meet, an open-source videoconferencing system built on WebRTC and TURN; TikTok tracking you across the web; Active Directory on Azure; USB SuperSpeed; a company hiring; Chinese transnational policing; a self-hosted photo-management system called Lychee using PHP, Laravel, Sass, npm, and Webpack; cyborgs; gambler's ruin; interspecific sociality in nonhuman apes; a detonation rocket test; social aspects of startups; a Microsoft UI bug with devastating consequences; a new approach to keeping trains apart; the international energy market; how to learn to program; gymnastic photographs from 01902; the tenth anniversary of TypeScript; the tradeoffs in Copilot, a deep-learning transformer that completes natural-language code based on a model trained on GitHub; testing React apps with Cypress, with a screencast; salted fish; and the relationship between rationality and wisdom.

Of these 30 items, 11 aren't even about software. Four others are built on systems software that existed in 02000: Emacs, Microsoft Windows, bash, and XMLHttpRequest. The other 15 are built on systems software that didn't exist when Pike wrote this paper: Cypress, React, Git, GitHub, TensorFlow, the transformer model, CUDA, OpenCL, Laravel, node.js, npm, Webpack, Azure, TURN (and NAT traversal in general), WebRTC, V8 and other high-performance JIT compilers for JS, wasm, Android and iOS (where people use TikTok), NewRelic and similar web profiling tools. (I'd say "org-mode" but really org-mode is more like an application than like systems software.)

A developer from 02000 transported forward to now would be totally lost in those 15 out of 19. They'd have no idea what they were even talking about, what kind of problems they were trying to solve.

In 02000, it's easy to forget, even using XMLHttpRequest was an advanced, risky thing. The web was made of documents, not applications. Applications ran on your webserver or, much more likely, your desktop. Since then we've moved to running the vast majority of our software in web browsers and the majority of our servers in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, none of which existed in 02000.

The mainstream programming languages of today are Python and JS, which both existed only as tiny niches back then. GPGPU was just beginning; Vulkan, OpenCL, and I think CUDA and even GLSL didn't exist. The most exciting developments of the last few years are things like Docker, Kubernetes, and Stable Diffusion, which all run on platforms that didn't exist in 02000. Not only didn't Intel CPUs support hardware virtualization, even VMWare was just starting to get adoption; virtualization was still mostly only a thing on IBM 360 mainframes.

For better or worse, it's certainly different.