I love motorcycles too. I've owned many sophisticated bikes: Ducatis with their strange Desmodromic heads. With the ability to dial an exchange of torque to horsepower at the handlebars. Buells with their fuel-in-frame chassis. My current Suzuki even has 4 sensors in the airbox alone. One that measures the air input pressure. One that measures the oxygen level. One that measures the air temperature. Really amazing performance. It will be in a junkyard within ten years though. I won't be able to find those sensors in a few years.
So all that new and advanced technology doesn't really interest me anymore. I'm looking for a 1969 Honda CL350 right now. They're still around and running fine. They're much simpler and much more maintainable. No Engine Computer. No sensors. Everything really easy to understand.
I kinda want my OS like that too. With all its warts I can keep it running.
> It will be in a junkyard within ten years though. I won't be able to find those sensors in a few years.
Not true. You will be able to get an aftermarket ECU that can just ignore the sensors and run in open-loop mode. That will be exactly the same as running with carburetors: fixed fuel/air ratio that is almost always wrong. This is also the failure mode for OBDII cars - sensor failures lead to the ECU running in open-loop mode, which lowers MPG and increases emissions, which will eventually foul the catalytic converters.
> I'm looking for a 1969 Honda CL350 right now. They're still around and running fine. They're much simpler and much more maintainable.
My wife has owned a CB175 and a CB550. Both required tons of work and were maintenance nightmares. They really are piece of shit bikes when it comes to reliability when compared to most Japanese bikes from 1990 onward. The prices old Honda bikes command on the market are completely out of whack with what you get because of strong demand from both the vintage bike enthusiast and hipster demographics. I would not ride one if it was given to me for free.
Maintenance "headaches" are part of the appeal of old bikes. It's much easier to learn how an internal combustion powered vehicle works on an old Honda bike than a new one, or on a new car.
Compared to other bikes of their day these are very simple to maintain and they were designed from the start to be kept running by the average person. It really depends on what you are looking for in a bike.
If enjoying turning a wrench on a Saturday makes me a hipster then pass the beard wax.
There is weekend wrenching and there is dealing with design flaws and poor manufacturing. Problems with the CB175 and CB550 that were not regular maintenance (carburetor/timing/valve/etc/etc) related:
* fast cylinder wear (poor materials/manufacturing, engine rebuilds all around)
* unreliable electric system ("mostly" fixed on CB550 with Charlie's solid state ignition and rectifier)
* Leaking gaskets (design flaw)
I know a lot of vintage Honda collectors and a few racers, and also a lot of vintage BMW collectors. BMW motorcycles from the same era do not have these problems.
What gaskets leaked? Side covers? I haven't had a problem with side cover gaskets but I did have some replacement non-JIS screws back out because they were not torqued properly. Can't speak to cylinder wear, my bike has close to 10k hard miles and doesn't compression test real well but does work fine.
Old side cover gaskets did, those were easy to replace. Something else was leaking before the engine rebuild, and then something else entirely started leaking after the rebuild.
I used to share your opinion, but hours of searching for no longer-made parts and obscure wrench sizes and other tools that often simply don't exist anymore cooled my enthusiasm somewhat (fixing 1960s camera lenses)
All the fasteners I have seen are standard metric sizes, what speciality tools are you referring to? The side cover screws can be stubborn but even a Philips #3 with an impact driver ($20.00 at the pawn shop) pops them right off. Conversion kits to standard allen head screws are cheap, on the order of $50.00 for the whole engine.
There is a special nut on the oil spinner but that's the only specialty tool I can think of on the bike until you start actually disassembling the whole thing and you don't even have to remove it to do an oil service. I guess the shock/steering head adjuster is a specialty tool? But that was included with the bike so not hard to find either.
Parts can be a bit harder but since these things were so popular it's a lot easier than any other bike from 1969. Also the aftermarket is huge if you don't care about staying totally stock.
To clarify, using three easy outs instead of the right tool is kind of like saying config files are flawed because they have to be edited. Tools are created for a job and it is up to us as engineers to use them properly.
i should really say the PO who stripped the engine bolts with a phillips head instead of a JIS driver made it kind of inevitable. 40 year old machines are interesting.
Most of the screws I have seen are trashed from people using screwdrivers instead of impact drivers. Even with the proper JIS bit the screws will still be ruined if you don't use an impact type tool. There's just no way to apply enough axial force to the fastener with a normal hand tool, even if the shape is correct.
That's what the impact driver is for. I didn't have to convert any bolts to metric, all those are already metric. Only the screws need to be converted.
Newer than 1990 doesn't mean fuel injected and sensors out the wazoo. I have a 2001 Bandit and it's brilliant, same power and fuel economy as the current model and pure old fashioned air cooled carbie goodness. Nearly 70k kms and the mechanic reckons it'll be good for as much again.
Exactly. 1990s carbureted Japanese bikes are far superior to 1970s ones in reliability both in terms of design and manufacturing quality. But CL550s go for more than Super Blackbirds. The only reason is the steep vintage/hipster markup.
The Bandit is a good example that parts availability has nothing to do with the technology used and everything to do with the market. My bike is actually a 2001 Bandit 600. The 2nd generation 1200 sold well in the United States, the 2nd generation 600 never did. The 1st generation 600 did sell. So there are a ton of aftermarket 1st generation 600 parts availabe in the US, but pretty much the only new replacement parts you can get for the 2nd generation 600 here (that are not in common with the 1200 or SV650, if you can figure out which ones those are) are rebuild kits for the off-the-shelf brakes and carbs, and you can get the gaskets cut. Everything else you either have to import from the UK or get custom-made, which usually ends up being cheaper (things I have had custom made: throttle cables, fork tube).
Did Honda even build a CL550? Was that a huge parallel twin or a four cylinder scrambler? Never heard of either of those configurations from Honda.
Do you mean CB550? If so they demand a higher price because they are 1) older and 2) look way better. Super Nighthawk performance isn't much to write home about relative to newer bikes for the same price and vintage bikes look really nice.
Now is probably a great time to pick up a Super Nighthawk because as with almost all vehicles their value drops off continually for their first 20 or so years until they are truly part of a previous generation of vehicles that is no longer available. Then the value starts to rise again due to scarcity.
We saw the same thing in the 90s with 1970s domestic cars which peaked in the 2000s. It's happening now with 1980s Japanese cars and has been happening to 1970s and 80s Japanese bikes.
As it stands, the Suzi's input pressure sensor is malfunctioning (a $200 part where available) and the bike backfires and splutters badly. So I'm not convinced that an open loop mode ECU won't end up with an engine fire or a hole in the piston.
Other folks have mentioned that the mechanical points can be swapped out for a solid state ignition on the CL, closing that loop of maintenance for starters.
My solution to carburetor issues on my CL was to replace the carburetors with another design from Mikuni. You do have the option to swap a megasquirt system on to your bike and then use sensors that are cheaper or more readily available. I'm not sure if that would be easier or not but it is an option and it is something that will become increasingly more common as "new" bikes become "old" over the next 10 or so years.
Interesting comment. Got to say I agree with the direction of it, to some extent - stable and powerful over newfangled and weak / unstable / buggy / done for glory rather than substance.
Do you know about the Royal Enfield Bullet [1] from India?
It is not at all as technologically sophisticated as the bikes you mention and others, but it is a fantastic bike to ride.
They are selling it in the West, too, from some years. Originally from the Enfield company, UK, then was manufactured in India for many decades (maybe starting around WWII), as the same standard model. Then a decade or more back, the new managing director invigorated the company with better quality, newer models, higher engine capacity (cc) models (like 500 cc), etc. - though I would not be surprised that some fans prefer the old one still - maybe me too, except not ridden it enough, I rode a 250 cc Yezdi much more - also a great bike, almost maintenance free, a successor to the classic Ideal Jawa bike from Czechoslovakia, and also made in India for many years. Yezdi was stopped some years ago, last I read, but the Bullet is still going strong and even being exported, a good amount, to the West.
My cousin and two of his friends recently did New Delhi - Brussels[0] on 1971, 1973 and 1974 Royal Enfields.They made it but they got a lot of mechanical problems. I guess that was part of the fun ;)
I almost bought a Bullet Classic 500 (sold with injection in Europe). It is probably much more reliable but it is probably a bit too limited for a 100km daily commute.
I went with a modern Triumph Street Twin instead. The mechanic told me he had to plug the bike to the computer to start it the first time. I don't know if he was joking but it made me feel uneasy.
Hey, Royal Enfield! My uncle was behind the company that was the sole distributor of Royal Enfield for Australia/NZ for a good decade or so (sold the business a few years ago).
I have a 1973 CL350 which I am currently getting back on the road. They are fantastic bikes, largely because they are robust, dead simple and Honda made tens of thousands of them. Having said that, they did have some components that have not aged well.
The number one flaw on these bikes in my opinion is the stock carburetors. Honda used a constant velocity type carburetor which in theory provides very smooth throttle action and is easier to ride. In reality the vacuum diaphragm is a very delicate part that frequently fails with tiny air holes that leak vacuum, causing a mismatch in the throttle input between the cylinders (twin carb two cylinder, one per cylinder). This is a similar failure mode to your modern Suzuki air pressure sensor failing.
The other pain point is the mechanical points in the ignition system. This is an area of constant fiddling with adjustment and new condensers. It's much preferred to simply replace the points system with a "modern" (1980s technology) electronic ignition system. This removes the moving parts and greatly extends the life of a tune-up.
Old bikes are super cool and the 350 platform is a fantastic one but even back then bikes had "high tech" parts that did not age well and gaps where better tech had not been invented. The great thing about the 350 platform is that due to its popularity people are still coming up with solutions. In this way a Honda 350 is similar to Unix.
What OS would be analogous to the Honda in your example? OpenBSD? Plan9?
Not Linux, surely. That would be more like the Suzuki, but it used to be an older bike so they left the carburetor in there and next year someone will add an electric motor too.
Any free software OS can meet his requirements as they all are transparent to anyone with the time to learn, just like the older bikes. The problem with modern bikes is that all the advanced tech is proprietary and you have no way of understanding it or tinkering with it.
IMO you can take any modern distro and strip it down to something understandable. It just takes some time to learn how to strip it down and how what's left works (and this is ongoing, as things are always changing). I'm not saying it's trivial, but neither is learning how to rebuild a motorcycle.
All systemd related processes (dbus, systemd-*, init, etc) running on my system are using < 25Mb of memory. So that is a bit excessive, even if exaggerating for effect.
I don't normally get into these, but this is blatantly false, I'm running systemd on multiple older/smaller computers like an OG Raspberry Pi and an old netbook, and I don't even notice its memory consumption.
I still have my 75 MHz Pentium 12MB EDO RAM laptop running Windows 95 and holding my old BBS sitting in my drawer. Battery is shot but plug it in and it still works.
I've used OpenBSD in the past and found it much simpler than Linux. But didn't always support what I needed to do. These days I'm doing less but doing it better.
I've always found the problem with alt os's is that I have to pick my device to match the OS. I just want a small but adequately powerful laptop, so Linux is my only real choice.
Occasionally when I run out of analogies for why convoluted systems are not 'flexible', I reach for a half-remembered homage, that I encountered as a teenager, about the Chevy Straight 6.
This was not a fancy engine. It was not a particularly powerful engine. Not a single thing on it or about it was exceptional. Because it was easy to work on and with add-ons and modifications it could be coaxed into doing things it wasn't really meant to do. It was just solid and got out of your way. So engineers and hobbyists tinkered and tinkered and got something over 2.5x the original horsepower out of the thing.
Unix commands might be solid, but the 'get out of your way' bit is what troubles me. People will lament otherwise good engines that are hard to work on because of a design flaw or the way they're laid out. Unix is falling down here. It's just that everyone else is at least as bad. But a guy can dream.
The single most disastrous failing of UNIX is the assumption that everyone wants to be a programmer - or if they don't want to be a programmer, they damn well should become a programmer anyway.
It's nonsense. Programming as it's done today - which is strongly influenced by UNIX ideas - is the last thing most users want to do. They have absolutely no interest in the concepts, the ideas, the assumptions, the mindset, the technology, or the practical difficulties of writing software.
UNIX set human-accessible computing back by decades. It eventually settled into a kind of compromise at Apple, where BSD supplied the plumbing and infrastructure and NeXT/Apple's built a simplified app creation system on top of it, which could then be used to build relatively friendly applications.
But it's still not right, because the two things that make UNIX powerful - interoperability and composability - didn't survive.
They were implemented in a way that's absolutely incomprehensible to non-programmers. Opaque documentation, zero standardisation for command options, and ridiculous command name choices all make UNIX incredibly user hostile. Meanwhile the underlying OS details, including the file systems and process model - never mind security - fall somewhat short of OS perfection.
The real effect of UNIX has been to keep programming professional and to keep user-friendly concepts well away from commercial and academic development.
Programming could have been made much more accessible, and there's consistent evidence from BASIC, Hypercard, VBA, the HTML web, and even Delphi (at a push) that the more accessible a development environment is made, the more non-developers will use it to get fun and/or useful things done.
UNIX has always worked hard to be the opposite - an impenetrably hostile wall of developer exceptionalism that makes the learning curve for development so brutally steep it might as well be vertical.
UNIX people like to talk about commercial walled gardens as if they're the worst possible thing. But UNIX is a walled garden itself, designed - whether consciously or not - to lock out non-professional non-developer users and make sure they don't go poking at things they shouldn't try to understand.
But it has to be. Linux can be super powerful. You can get very close to the metal. While a lot of people want to use it as an appliance, it really isn't. Just like all the other trades there is history which begets convention which begets culture. And like any good power tool you've got to know what you're doing, or you could get yourself into trouble.
The problem, I think, is that we seem to have trouble conceptualizing the schism that exists between the computing-as-a-tool users (aka the elites, power users, and programmers) and computing-as-an-appliance users (aka the computing mainstream). Both camps have wildly different wants, needs, and expectations.
Why can't both continue to exist separately? The elites don't want their tools weakened, and the mainstream just wants stuff to work. Split computing down the middle at desktops+laptops vs tablets+mobile+consoles and keep the separation clean. Now that we have iPads and whatnot there's no reason to keep nontechnicals on a PC if they don't want to be there... so why not let PCs return to the nerds?
> UNIX set human-accessible computing back by decades. [...]
I do not agree at all. Closed-garden non-free eco systems like Windows set back computing.
> Programming could have been made much more accessible, and there's consistent evidence from BASIC, Hypercard, VBA, the HTML web, and even Delphi (at a push) that the more accessible a development environment is made, the more non-developers will use it to get fun and/or useful things done.
So why are they not going strong? There are implementations for BASIC for most systems and even Delphi is still available.
> [...] But UNIX is a walled garden itself, designed - whether consciously or not - to lock out non-professional non-developer users [...]
Assuming with UNIX you mean implementations today (like Linux) this is not true at all.
I do not want to say Unix (with BSDs and Linux today) is the absolute best we can do, but I am pretty sure that it is on a local optimum in the operating systems space.
I agree with a lot of what you wrote. It's true that there is a "keep it for the elite" mindset in the back of many programmers' mind. For years at forums I've seen that while I tried hard to explain basic concepts to newbies, others were happier with the RTFM answer.
Still I'm not so sure that UNIX (or programmers) is the source of it. I started with DOS (later Windows) and TP (later Delphi) so please don't think I'm biased here.
I have recently bought an Acer convertible for my mother with Windows 10 and so I'm getting a reality check on the sad state of computer usability in 2017. Teaching her to use an Android phone was difficult, but this is not better.
IMHO the reason of user-hostility is not some guild mindset, it's just that computer adoption is needed much faster than the time it would take to develop decent GUIs. The RTFM knee-jerk reaction comes later from people with some deep insecurities and not much imagination.
Totally agree on that UNIX is also a sort of walled garden. I'd say the same thing about GPL'd ecosystem, in this case for license issues.
I'd guess that much of this depends on who's writing the software. FOSS was (and still is to a great degree) driven by "nerds" in their spare time. If there's no Steve Jobs that smacks programmers about for neglecting the user experience for non-technical users, it won't make much progress. At other places (say Redhat) there's no big need to focus on non-technical users for business reasons when it comes to much of development. And so on and so forth.
If you can accredit Apple with one thing, it would be that they got this mainly right.
When it comes to Windows... I guess that's the result if one main player has a de facto monopoly over a certain software space. That, and "legacy reasons". It's like Adobe who couldn't even get their hotkeys merged between various of their big applications.
I've only owned a Mac and honestly I hasn't found it really better. Actually I was surprised to find there are unsolvable user hostility problems like font size. For most Windows annoyances there were usually some registry key that you can touch.
Yeah... I've found Mac/iOS to be quite frustrating actually. Especially nowadays that their UI's a designed by designers who like things to be pretty — and you just can't change something no matter how bad it is (unless you want the touchpad to move the scrollbar instead of the page. they'll let you do that, even tho it's completely useless. they're not opposed to choice or flexibility, just opposed to ones that make things understandable or powerful at the expense of pretty).
all of your arguments here - pro or con - are reflections of philosophy and have nothing to do with computers
> The single most disastrous failing of UNIX is the assumption that everyone wants to be a programmer - or if they don't want to be a programmer, they damn well should become a programmer anyway.
this presumes programming (which itself is simply logical thinking) is something obscure and 'scary'. Elementary school computer literacy courses in the mid-late 80s/ early 90s routinely taught more programming know-how to adolescents than college graduates have today. Is this because kids are stupid? or has the goal of curricula been relegated from 'high level understdanding and knowledge' to 'economic productivity within the present system'?
> The real effect of UNIX has been to keep programming professional and to keep user-friendly concepts well away from commercial and academic development.
really? is that why UNIX minis rapidly displaced mainframes in the late 70s/early 80s, with major advances primarily being derived from the cross-compatibility of most unix flavors being shared within industry and academia? Or is this another argument towards 'economic productivity within the current sytem' ?
> Programming could have been made much more accessible, and there's consistent evidence from BASIC, Hypercard, VBA, the HTML web, and even Delphi (at a push) that the more accessible a development environment is made, the more non-developers will use it to get fun and/or useful things done.
a) by evidence, you're referring to cross-linked excel spreadsheet nightmares?
b) by evidence, why does this not include all of the literally millions of interpreted
programs in say shell, awk, TCL, and so on written by unix users in professional
settings across time?
c) compare shell scripting to batch scripting. seriously. Also, the web was invented
on Unix.
d) See also use of lisp, etc. in the 80s for pretty much the same things
I argue that the issues you are speaking about here primarily derive as a result
of the workstation Unix market focusing on the higher end, while the low end grew
on the PC side - which has nothing to due with the Unix tradition itself, which
due to licensing issues with AT&T, etc. was relegated to somewhat obscurity
during the heavy capitialization of the PC market of the 80s.
> UNIX has always worked hard to be the opposite - an impenetrably hostile wall of developer exceptionalism that makes the learning curve for development so brutally steep it might as well be vertical.
Really? Is that why, from nearly day 1, the entire system was distributed on
a single tape with complete binaries, sources, and manual pages contained on
the same, self-hosting installation?
Again - while lesser users will use their knowledge of the system as some
narcissistic playing card, this is their own personality flaws being interjected
into the philosophical difference I mentioned previously (achieving knowledge vs
brutish ad-hoc productivity)
> UNIX people like to talk about commercial walled gardens as if they're the worst possible thing. But UNIX is a walled garden itself, designed - whether consciously or not - to lock out non-professional non-developer users and make sure they don't go poking at things they shouldn't try to understand.
Again, I think this supposition is derived from the growth of the commercial
Unix market, which deliberately split source code and documentation into tiny
little fragments, only some of which could be even attained in the first place,
and could only be run on proprietary hardware. Unix itself (the portable software system)
grew in a mostly obscure, tangential lineage that was then 'walled off' from naive
end users through marketing efforts of proprietary vendors. See also BSD UNIX.
> Opaque documentation, zero standardisation for command options, and ridiculous command name choices all make UNIX incredibly user hostile.
yes, things are inconsistent. but that is because the system grew organically.
I give much kudos to VMS for being very solid and coherent in this regard -
but that was just as much a walled garden as anything else, and still is (though
interesting things could still come from the OpenVMS company)
nothing precluded anyone from bolting on a coherent addon to the unix base,
and indeed many did. However they failed because unix is not a product,
but a product of organic human culture -
and so ones qualms with unix are really ones unresolved qualms with human endeavor itself.
Like my Moto Guzzi from the 1970ies. It is so simple built, you can adjust the valves during a gas stop.
There is a great virtue in simple design, it seems to be forgotten nowadays. Like the famous Russian rocket engineer Koroljow (built Sputnik) said: Everyone can build complicated
I did similar with cars, though I still have the ECU to deal with. Eventually I'll replace that with a Megasquirt, because I can repair/replace all the components and know how the whole system works.
When I thought I wanted a bike, I looked around for a Condor A350.
This kind of thing comes up a lot in discussions of operating systems, and while you and I might want to get "under the hood" the majority of users never want to do that, and know they don't know what they'd be doing if they got there. And accept that a sealed system might be safer (more secure) for them. Being able to maintain it yourself is a benefit, but having to maintain it when there's another maintenance-free option is unappealing.
Hence UNIX (of a sort) is actually quite popular on both iPhones and Android - but not in ways accessible to the user. Even if you do have to replace Android devices every few years because the manufacturer won't maintain them either.
I have a Kawasaki KLR 650. Kawasaki has been selling pretty much the same bike since 1987. No fuel injection or ABS. They are very inexpensive (new ones can be had for about $6000). There's a running joke in the community that every year the main update on the new model is bold new graphics.
Spare parts are easy to find and there are a lot of aftermarket parts.
The downside is that the bike is basically a late '80's bike. 40ish horsepower, poor fuel economy, weak brakes, poor handling, etc...
But, like lots of people say, it's more fun to drive a slow bike fast than a fast bike slowly. I love it.
So all that new and advanced technology doesn't really interest me anymore. I'm looking for a 1969 Honda CL350 right now. They're still around and running fine. They're much simpler and much more maintainable. No Engine Computer. No sensors. Everything really easy to understand.
I kinda want my OS like that too. With all its warts I can keep it running.