"I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn't being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive"
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A peculiarly engineer-ish confession: the “it” isn’t just some piece of software, it’s a quiet tax on the whole system. Joy’s line captures a foundational Silicon Valley lesson before it became a slogan: inefficiency isn’t always dramatic; it’s often the boring, invisible result of social habits encoded into machines. Everyone keeping “their own copy” reads like a technical detail, but it’s really a cultural critique of siloed ownership. The performance hit isn’t caused by malice or incompetence so much as default behavior: people hoard local control, and the infrastructure pays.
The subtext is a rebuke of waste born from non-cooperation. In a lab environment, “shared” isn’t merely a feature; it’s a philosophy about how computing should work when resources are scarce and communal. Joy’s emphasis on “years” and “huge amounts” turns the sentence into an indictment of slow institutional drift: small design decisions, left unchallenged, become long-term drag. He’s also sneaking in a moral of early computing economics. “Back when memory was expensive” isn’t nostalgia; it’s a reminder that constraints sharpen judgment. When every kilobyte has a cost, duplication becomes not just sloppy but irresponsible.
Contextually, this lands in the era when Unix culture, shared timesharing systems, and tight hardware budgets forced engineers to think about collective efficiency. Joy is pointing at a pre-cloud world where “everyone has their own copy” was the path of least resistance - and where that convenience quietly throttled progress.
The subtext is a rebuke of waste born from non-cooperation. In a lab environment, “shared” isn’t merely a feature; it’s a philosophy about how computing should work when resources are scarce and communal. Joy’s emphasis on “years” and “huge amounts” turns the sentence into an indictment of slow institutional drift: small design decisions, left unchallenged, become long-term drag. He’s also sneaking in a moral of early computing economics. “Back when memory was expensive” isn’t nostalgia; it’s a reminder that constraints sharpen judgment. When every kilobyte has a cost, duplication becomes not just sloppy but irresponsible.
Contextually, this lands in the era when Unix culture, shared timesharing systems, and tight hardware budgets forced engineers to think about collective efficiency. Joy is pointing at a pre-cloud world where “everyone has their own copy” was the path of least resistance - and where that convenience quietly throttled progress.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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