We all live in a virtual machine…
April 10th, 2009 by Alex Neihaus
A long time ago, I was a systems programmer on mainframes. I was blown away by the concept of virtual machines — a concept IBM introduced in the late 70’s that it then tried to kill in the 80’s in favor of things like TSO (email me if you remember and still hate TSO.)
But VM/370 (the OS) refused to die. Keeping it alive in the face of the IBM internal onslaught seeking to kill it was a rabid band of aficionados, mostly from universities. In the mid-80’s, I attended a Guide meeting where kindred souls handed out a songbook with VM-based lyrics set to popular tunes. (Yes, geeks in those days tippled, then sang geek songs. And, yes, I loved it.)
The one that has been burned into my mind is We All Live in a Virtual Machine, set the tune by The Beatles. I loved it for the double entendre of the title: computing and life may well be just an illustion of reality. And, no, I won’t torture you with the lyrics.
Well, what does any of this reminiscence have to do with BPM and ActiveVOS?
Nothing. It’s about this blog. And what we’ve done with the blog.
I am writing this post on our spankin’ new server. WordPress is the first app I’ve moved to this new server. And guess what, it’s a virtualized server. Yes, all these years later, what was old is now new again. (Though many people hot on virtualization believe passionately that it’s a new concept.)
Our blog — which has been growning as the BPM and ActiveVOS communities grow — needed a new home. One we had lots of control over. So, we have moved from a hosted plan to a VM on a server in a hosted data center. This should make downloads of our content (like the webinar replays and podcasts which are so popular) and the general responsiveness of the blog much faster.
And, because it’s a virtualized environment, things went very smoothly. And so, I’ve been humming We All Live in a Virtual Machine all day.
Tags: BPM
