From a HN thread

It’s crazy and destructive that we are still using the unix paradigm in the cloud.

In the 70s we have transparent network fileststems, and by the 80s I had a more advanced cloud-native environment at PARC than is available today.* The Lispms were not quite as cloud native as that, but still you could have the impression that you just sat down at a terminal and had immediate window into an underlying “cloud” reality, with its degree of “nativeness” depending on the horsepower of the machine you were using. This is quite different from, say, a chromebook which is more like a remote terminal to a mainframe.

I was shocked when I encountered a Sun workstation: what an enormous step backwards. The damned thing even ran sendmail. Utterly the wrong paradigm, in many ways much worse than mainframe computing. Really we haven’t traveled that far since those days. Cloud computing really still it “somebody else’s computer.”

There’s no “OS” (in the philosophical sense) for treating remote resources truly abstractly, much less a hybrid local/remote. Applications have gone backwards to being PC-like silos. I feel like none of the decades of research in these areas is reflected in the commercial clouds, even though the people working there are smart and probably know that work well.

• Don’t get me wrong: these environments only ran on what are small, slow machines by today’s standards and mostly only ran on the LAN.