Well, one small step.

I first encountered package management in SGI IRIX. IRIX had a "mini root", which was an installer, subset of IRIX, running single user mode. Just know it's there for now, and hold that thought.

Most of the time, people launched "swmgr", which put a nice GUI on top of "inst", which was the actual tool doing the work. Inst eventually could pull from an http repository, and of course, worked with file based ones, mounted however made best sense.

That thing was seriously potent! One time, I needed to setup Alias renderer software on a bunch of machines to push out a little movie. So I just did it, remote displaying the gui on my O2 after mounting a shared image to work from.

Asked them all to load it, and about half reported out of space. Right MID INSTALL, I was given the option to do some removals, so I did, at which point the primary task could continue. Short story was it took about 30 minutes to blast some renderer software onto about 10 IRIX boxes, all with users logged in, doing stuff.

(Yes, I looked at what they were running, and pulled some sub-systems that wouldn't impact them, and no, they didn't ever know it was done, but for some disk activity)

After authoring a little script to push frames around, I set 'em all to render with every free cycle, and as users left the building, added a renderer process and escalated the priority of both. It all got done, I pulled the software, and on the machines that I had pruned from, put that all back, and never heard a peep.

Awesome. No reboots.

The other notable thing was taking my very first IRIX filesystem from a modest Indy, all the way through to a multi-CPU Origin system. Each time, I would clone it, setup on a new box, launch that mini-root, have it evaluate what was there, issue a couple of commands to keep configuration, update system, go. And it would update all the libraries, drivers, and assorted bits to run on the new box.

From time to time, I would need to do a little cleanup, maybe touching an unmanaged application and a setting or two, but I really did carry one file system through about 10 years of computing, using a package manager to keep it sorted with basically zero issues.

This was mid 90's.

Linux has most of those features today, (hello apt get!) and it's a bigger mess of packages, but then again, there is a whole lot more managed now than IRIX had. Some companies would produce managed packages and sync up with SGI, and those were great. Others were tarballs. Oh well. One could make packages and go that way, and I did a time or two, but mostly didn't.

The thing I liked the most about that era of software, and about IRIX in particular, was how just about every single thing was written to be effective and useful on the command line, and in scripted form.

Additionally, most everything had a --gui, or --verbose option, or both that would improve on the console I/O to the point where a gui could just be a wrapper, able to do what it needs to do without there being anything separate needed. When in single user mode, or remote console, terminal, whatever, really didn't matter. One could script, run a gui, command line, whatever, and it all just worked fine.

Back then, I saw Linux growing, and also later, saw Linux start to get the better bits of IRIX as SGI moved off IRIX and MIPS and onto Linux Itanium. That caused me to pick up a copy of Redhat 5.2 and begin switching over. One of the best moves I ever made actually.

So those days on IRIX are long gone, but I really do miss the fantastic systems engineering, package management, and documentation they shipped. It was complete, and if you went digging, what you needed to know actually shipped on the box with very, very few exceptions.

Windows... Yeah, it's better now. I run it all the time, and that's due to some software and the niche I'm in. No worries. But it really never did compare to the work SGI did in the 90's. Few things have.

I'm glad to see this. Just like I'm glad to see lots of things in Microsoft land, many way overdue.

I just wish it would launch a bit more complete and be a bit less painful before it really settles in and works well.

Maybe somebody should give these guys a tour of computing outside the bubble. There were a lot of really great things done. Seems to me, getting them done again, now, unabashedly is the right move. No shame. Just do it.

Lots of us would be a lot happier, and we really don't care where it comes from. Just nail it for those of us who have to continue to run the OS.

Thanks.