GoKawiilOpenClaw isn’t fooling me. I remember MS-DOS.
The sad days of DOS. Any program could peek and poke the kernel, hook interrupts, write anywhere on disk. There was no safety.
The fix wasn’t a wrapper, or a different shell. It was a whole different approach to what was being done. The world already had rings, virtual memory, ACLs, separate address spaces. Thirty years of separations that Unix had from the start were ignored, and it finally caught up to the world of DOS.
I’m not saying DOS wasn’t wildly popular. Oh my god. I remember one dark night in a bar in Chicago, a drunk Swedish IT consultant jumped onto a table and said “listen up everyone!”. As he waved his beer mug around, sloshing carelessly, with wobbly legs, he said he was in town to work on Wal-Mart Point-of-sale (POS) devices running MS-DOS. Why was he acting like this? He was happy, very, very happy. He wanted us to know he loved his work, something like “CAN YOU BELIEVE WAL-MART HAS HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOS MACHINES WITH ALL YOUR F$%#$%NG PAYMENT CARD DATA?! HAHAHA! AND IT ALL HAS ONE PASSWORD THAT EVERYONE SHARES! YOU WANT IT?! I GOT IT RIGHT HERE! FREEDOM, AMERICA, F$#%$K YEAH!”
True story. Both the guy and Wal-Mart put ALL customer information on MSDOS with exactly zero safety.
NCR had just announced a new MS-DOS-based PC…we decided to build a custom solution for Wal-Mart. I managed to connect a cash drawer and a POS printer to the new PC and wrote a dedicated Layaway application in compiled MS Basic. For the first time, Wal-Mart could store customer info on a disk. A clerk could search by name in seconds, and more importantly, the system tracked exactly where the merchandise was tucked away in the backroom. It was a massive efficiency win, and NCR ultimately rolled it out to all Wal-Mart stores.
Personal identity information was never breached faster! Massive efficiency win, indeed. When Wal-Mart was breached in 2006 they naturally had to wait three long years to notify anyone. So efficient.
Agent gateways feel like we are racing backwards into the MS-DOS era. At any minute in a bar I expect a drunk Swedish IT consultant to be standing on a table waving a lobster around, swearing about his single token for all agents. Because, let’s face it, when you look at gateways out there they can hand the model an exec tool and trust it. One process, one token, with the LLM holding the line.
NVIDIA clearly has seen the storm brewing and therefore published a thoughtful tutorial walking through a “NemoClaw” self-hosted agent setup on DGX Spark.
Use NVIDIA DGX Spark to deploy OpenClaw and NemoClaw end-to-end, from model serving to Telegram connectivity, with full control over your runtime environment.
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