This recently went round the FreeBSD-chat mailing list. I rather like
it, and tend to agree with the opinions. Unfortunately, the URL
appears mutilated, and the site itself is "under maintenance", but
Google points me at what appears to be the same article at
http://www.rap.ucar.edu/staff/tres/elements.html
I haven't resisted the temptation to re-wrap the paragraphs :-)
Greg
Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 19:55:31 -0400
From: Allen <slackwarewolf(a)comcast.net>
this is somewhat long... But some of you may have already read it, and
probably liked it:
[ From http://www.performancecomputing.com...s/9809of1.shtml ]
The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
If there's nothing different about UNIX people, how come
so many were liberal-arts majors? It's the love of words
that makes UNIX stand out.
Thomas Scoville
In the late 1980s, I worked in the advanced R&D arm of the Silicon
Valley's regional telephone company. My lab was populated mostly by
Ph.D.s and gifted hackers. It was, as you might expect, an all-UNIX
shop.
The manager of the group was an exception: no advanced degree, no
technical credentials. He seemed pointedly self-conscious about it. We
suspected he felt (wrongly, we agreed) underconfident of his education
and intellect.
One day, a story circulated through the group that confirmed our
suspicions: the manager had confided he was indeed intimidated by the
intelligence of the group, and was taking steps to remedy the
situation.
His prescription, though, was unanticipated: "I need to become more of
an intellectual," he said. "I'm going to learn UNIX."
Needless to say, we made more than a little fun out of this. I mean,
come on: as if UNIX could transform him into a mastermind, like the
supplicating scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz." I uncharitably imagined
a variation on the old Charles Atlas ads: "Those senior engineers will
never kick sand in my face again."
But part of me was sympathetic: "The boss isn't entirely wrong, is he?
There is something different about UNIX people, isn't there?" In the
years since, I've come to recognize what my old manager was getting
at.
I still think he was misguided, but in retrospect I think his belief
was more accurate than I recognized at the time.
To be sure, the UNIX community has its own measure of technical
parochialism and nerdy tunnel vision, but in my experience there
seemed to be a suspicious overrepresentation of polyglots and
liberal-arts folks in UNIX shops.
I'll admit my evidence is sketchy and anecdotal. For instance, while
banging out a line of shell, with a fellow engineer peering over my
shoulder, I might make an intentionally obscure literary reference:
if test -z `ps -fe | grep whom`
then
echo ^G
fi
# Let's see for whom the bell tolls.
UNIX colleagues were much more likely to recognize and play in a way
I'd never expect in the VMS shops, IBM's big-iron data centers, or DOS
ghettos on my consulting beat.
Being a liberal-arts type myself (though I cleverly concealed this in
my resume), I wondered why this should be true.
My original explanation--UNIX's historical association with university
computing environments, like UC Berkeley's--didn't hold up over the
years; many of the UNIX-philiacs I met came from schools with small or
absent computer science departments.
There had to be a connection, but I had no plausible hypothesis.
It wasn't until I started regularly asking UNIX refuseniks what they
didn't like about UNIX that better explanations emerged.
Some of the prevailing dislike had a distinctly populist
flavor--people caught a whiff of snobbery about UNIX and regarded it
with the same proletarian resentment usually reserved for highbrow
institutions like opera or ballet.
They had a point: until recently, UNIX was the lingua franca of
computing's upper crust. The more harried, practical, and
underprivileged of the computing world seemed to object to this aura
of privilege.
UNIX adepts historically have been a coddled bunch, and tend to be
proud of their hard-won knowledge. But these class differences are
fading fast in modern computing environments.
Now UNIX engineers are more common, and low- or no-cost UNIX
variations run on inexpensive hardware. Certainly UNIX folks aren't as
coddled in the age of NT.
There was a standard litany of more specific criticisms: UNIX is
difficult and time-consuming to learn. There are too many things to
remember. It's arcane and needlessly complex.
But the most recurrent complaint was that it was too
text-oriented. People really hated the command line, with all the
utilities, obscure flags, and arguments they had to memorize. They
hated all the typing.
One mislaid character and you had to start over. Interestingly, this
complaint came most often from users of the GUI-laden Macintosh or
Windows platforms. People who had slaved away on DOS batch scripts or
spent their days on character-based terminals of multiuser non-UNIX
machines were less likely to express the same grievance.
Though I understood how people might be put off by having to remember
such willfully obscure utility names like cat and grep, I continued to
be puzzled at why they resented typing.
Then I realized I could connect the complaint with the scores of
"intellectual elite" (as my manager described them) in UNIX shops. The
common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my
UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort
and fluency with text and printed words.
They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those
strengths. UNIX was, in some sense, literature to them. Suddenly the
overrepresentation of polyglots, liberal-arts types, and voracious
readers in the UNIX community didn't seem so mysterious, and pointed
the way to a deeper issue: in a world increasingly dominated by image
culture (TV, movies, .jpg files), UNIX remains rooted in the culture
of the word.
UNIX programmers express themselves in a rich vocabulary of system
utilities and command-line arguments, along with a flexible, varied
grammar and syntax.
For UNIX enthusiasts, the language becomes second nature.
Once, I overheard a conversation in a Palo Alto restaurant:
"there used to be a shrimp-and-pasta plate here under ten bucks. Let
me see...cat menu | grep shrimp | test -lt $10..." though not
syntactically correct (and less-than-scintillating conversation), a
diner from an NT shop probably couldn't have expressed himself as
casually.
With UNIX, text--on the command line, STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR--is the
primary interface mechanism: UNIX system utilities are a sort of Lego
construction set for word-smiths.
Pipes and filters connect one utility to the next, text flows
invisibly between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the
utility set is literally a word dance.
Working on the command line, hands poised over the keys uninterrupted
by frequent reaches for the mouse, is a posture familiar to wordsmiths
(especially the really old guys who once worked on teletypes or
electric typewriters).
It makes some of the same demands as writing an essay. Both require
composition skills. Both demand a thorough knowledge of grammar and
syntax. Both reward mastery with powerful, compact expression.
At the risk of alienating both techies and writers alike, I also
suggest that UNIX offers something else prized in literature: a
coherence, a consistent style, something writers call a voice.
It doesn't take much exposure to UNIX before you realize that the UNIX
core was the creation of a very few well-synchronized minds.
I've never met Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, or Ken Thompson, but
after a decade and a half on UNIX I imagine I might greet them as
friends, knowing something of the shape of their thoughts.
You might argue that UNIX is as visually oriented as other OSs. Modern
UNIX offerings certainly have their fair share of GUI-based OS
interfaces.
In practice though, the UNIX core subverts them; they end up serving
UNIX's tradition of word culture, not replacing it.
Take a look at the console of most UNIX workstations: half the windows
you see are terminal emulators with command-line prompts or vi jobs
running within.
Nowhere is this word/image culture tension better represented than in
the contrast between UNIX and NT. When the much-vaunted UNIX-killer
arrived a few years ago, backed by the full faith and credit of the
Redmond juggernaut, I approached it with an open mind.
But NT left me cold. There was something deeply unsatisfying about
it. I had that ineffable feeling (apologies to Gertrude Stein) there
was no there there.
Granted, I already knew the major themes of system and network
administration from my UNIX days, and I will admit that registry
hacking did vex me for a few days, but after my short scramble up the
learning curve I looked back at UNIX with the feeling I'd been demoted
from a backhoe to a leaf-blower.
NT just didn't offer room to move. The one-size-fits-all,
point-and-click, we've-already-anticipated-all-your-needs world of NT
had me yearning for those obscure command-line flags and man -k.
I wanted to craft my own solutions from my own toolbox, not have my
ideas slammed into the visually homogenous, prepackaged, Soviet world
of Microsoft Foundation Classes.
NT was definitely much too close to image culture for my comfort:
endless point-and-click graphical dialog boxes, hunting around the
screen with the mouse, pop-up after pop-up demanding my attention.
The experience was almost exclusively reactive. Every task demanded a
GUI-based utility front-end loaded with insidious assumptions about
how to visualize (and thus conceptualize) the operation.
I couldn't think "outside the box" because everything literally was a
box. There was no opportunity for ad hoc consideration of how a task
might alternately be performed.
I will admit NT made my life easier in some respects. I found myself
doing less remembering (names of utilities, command arguments, syntax)
and more recognizing (solution components associated with check boxes,
radio buttons, and pull-downs).
I spent much less time typing. Certainly my right hand spent much more
time herding the mouse around the desktop.
But after a few months I started to get a tired, desolate feeling,
akin to the fatigue I feel after too much channel surfing or
videogaming: too much time spent reacting, not enough spent in active
analysis and expression. In short, image-culture burnout.
The one ray of light that illuminated my tenure in NT environments was
the burgeoning popularity of Perl. Perl seemed to find its way into NT
shops as a CGI solution for Web development, but people quickly
recognized its power and adopted it for uses far outside the scope of
Web development: system administration, revision control, remote file
distribution, network administration.
The irony is that Perl itself is a subset of UNIX features condensed
into a quick-and-dirty scripting language. In a literary light, if
UNIX is the Great Novel, Perl is the Cliffs Notes.
Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The
price of freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute.
Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped,
pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. I'm hoping that as IT folks become more
seasoned and less impressed by superficial convenience at the expense
of real freedom, they will yearn for the kind of freedom and
responsibility UNIX allows. When they do, UNIX will be there to fill
the need.
Thomas Scoville has been wrestling with UNIX since 1983. He currently
works at Expert Support Inc. in Mountain View, CA.
--
Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
Andrzey wrote:
>I have taken my info about unics from
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unics .
>
>Perhaps You could comment on this, because Your person is mentioned there.
>
Don't believe everything in a (or the) wiki.
>BTW One cound abbreviate "Uniplexed Information and Computer System" as
>UNIACS .
One could, but wouldn't.
Dennis
First, my apologies if this message looks awful.
The pun might have stemmed from another variant. Like
EUNICE.
The original poster was certainly not much aware of
UNIX history, so
it might as well come to him from an also less
knowledgeable user who
got it from a vendor of a EUNI* variant.
>From memory, I seem to remember at least a company
named EUNICE involved
with UNIX, and a UNIX-like environment for the VAX
(under VMS).
So, may be one of these later was actually named with
the 'eunuchs' pun
intended (perhaps as a castrated down UNIX system on
top of VMS)
and the pun circulated among some customers. For a
newcomer buying it,
it would be easy to assimilate *his* variant with
standard UNIX and extend
the pun. We just saw a similar confussion of LINUX
with UNIX from a poster
asking for LINUX v5, 6 o 7.
It makes sense as well to have a similar pun
circulated later, when other
operating systems which were arguably better (and I DO
NOT want to start
that discussion) or more extensive had to deploy
support for POSIX/UNIX
due to market needs.
To me it certainly has no sense having such an
association in a time like
the early 70s when it would have had a much stronger
emotional charge and
at a time when UNIX was still in its early
development.
j
On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 23:41:06 -0400
dmr(a)plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> Michael Welle originally asked,
>
> > last week a work mate told us a tale about how
Unix came to its
> > name. He believes that Unix is named after the
term eunuch (a
> > homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One
can see Unix as a
> > castrated successor of Multics.
>
> The pun may have been at the back of Kernighan's
mind,
> but the original explanation was "one of whatever
> Multics was many of." I think the quip about
> "castrated Multics" came from MIT.
>
> Incidentally, I don't think the Unics spelling ever
occurred
> in print, though I could be proved wrong.
>
> Dennis
__________________________________________________
Correo Yahoo!
Espacio para todos tus mensajes, antivirus y antispam ¡gratis!
Regístrate ya - http://correo.yahoo.es
Michael Welle originally asked,
> last week a work mate told us a tale about how Unix came to its
> name. He believes that Unix is named after the term eunuch (a
> homophone of (to?) unix in english language). One can see Unix as a
> castrated successor of Multics.
The pun may have been at the back of Kernighan's mind,
but the original explanation was "one of whatever
Multics was many of." I think the quip about
"castrated Multics" came from MIT.
Incidentally, I don't think the Unics spelling ever occurred
in print, though I could be proved wrong.
Dennis
Interesting thread. The Jargon file only says:
[In the authors' words, "A weak pun on Multics"; very early on it was "UNICS"]
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/U/Unix.html
It never occurred to me that the pun might not be recognized, even to
people whose first language is not English. Americans sometimes forget
that not everyone is American.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John Cowan" <cowan(a)ccil.org>
> To: "Andrzej Popielewicz" <vasco(a)icpnet.pl>
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Unix, eunuchs?
> Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 11:02:26 -0400
> English has always had an appetite for borrowed words, ever since we
> replaced huge amounts of our native vocabulary with borrowed French,
> Latin, and Greek words.
I would rather say "augmented" than "replaced", and of course one should
not neglect the other languages from which there have been significant
borrowings, such as Hindi, which are not, of course, as extensive as from
the languages you mention.
> (There is, however, just to get *completely* off-topic, the curious
> case of the English word "spruce", which means any of various coniferous
> evergreen trees of the genus _Picea_. Most of this word is unquestionably
> from "Pruce", the older English name for Prussia, now obsolete.
> But Wikipedia suggests, perhaps rightly, that the initial s- comes
> from a misinterpretation of the Polish phrase _z Prus_ 'from Prussia'.
> English dictionaries are not conclusive.)
Well, the definition of Spruce in the OED has several quotations from
the 17th century and before, which seem to indicate that one of the
names for Prussia was in fact "Spruce", which suggests that the
Wikipedia article may not be in fact accurate. The "z Prus" etymology,
without any supporting evidence, is tenuous...
1378 Durh. Acc. Rolls (Surtees) 47 In xxiiij piscibus de sprws empt.,
ijs. 14.. Chaucer's Dethe Blaunche 1025 (MS. Bodl. 638), She wolde
not..send men yn-to Walakye, To Sprewse & yn-to Tartarye. 1521 in
Ellis Orig. Lett. Ser. II. I. 292 The expedition of the Gentlemen
of Spruce. c1550 BALE K. Johan (Camden) 9 In Sycell, in Naples, in
Venys and Ytalye, In Pole, Spruse and Berne. 1639 FULLER Holy War
V. iii. 233 They busied themselves in defending of Christendome,..as
the Teutonick order defended Spruce-land against the Tartarian.
1656 G. ABBOT Descr. World 69 On the east and north corner of Germany
lyeth a country called Prussia, in English Pruthen or Spruce.
Greetings Hellwig
Mine Brooder in Unix Dast ist!
I have noticed something about your v7 creation. When I try to use the C
compiler to compile fp support or any system structures(not structs but
components) I get an error /lib/c0 so there's something wrong with the c0
pass in libc. It was probably that way when the tapes were recovered. I have
managed to compile and assemble all the c source in the /usr/src/cmd/c
directory into object files so the assembler works. What should I do
manually with all these .o files? I need a working compiler.
Bill
I have I V7 system Warren that runs on PDP-11 that was created from some
of Keith Bostics's fileblock fragments. I can get this system up and running
but the C compiler seems to be broke. I get ***error 8 which I don't know
what that means but it's probably a pdp11 error code. I'm still trying to
learn about the pdps but do you know how I might regenerate this C compiler
from v7 that will fix c0? When I try to add floating point number emulation
to the C compiler and regen things I always get an error at c0. How could I
regenerate the c0 pass file? That seems to be the only thing that's stopping
me from going further. I don't know if the compiler can be rebuilt from
scratch if something like lib/c0 is broken.
Bill
OK, so I'm wwwwwaaaaaaayyyyyyy behind on reading TUHS.
I just wanted to say that if you can find a copy of the third edition
of "Unix In A Nutshell" (NOT the current fourth edition) you'll find
a chapter on the MM macros. It should be enough to make use of them,
as I did buy one of the SysIII licenses and I have a copy of this paper
that I referred to when writing that chapter.
And groff did do a good enough job formatting it that I was able
to print it out and it looked reasonable if not perfect. (Of course,
that was circa 1999...)
If I ever Get A Round Tuit I want to take the troff material from that
edition and do it as an ebook for O'Reilly. But I don't know when or
even if that'll ever happen.
Arnold
> Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:25:49 +0100
> From: Gunnar Ritter <gunnarr(a)acm.org>
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] papers on the -mm macros?
> To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org, "A. Wik" <aw(a)aw.gs>
>
> "A. Wik" <aw(a)aw.gs> wrote:
>
> > I've found the documentation for most of the major
> > troff preprocessors and macros packages, but I can't
> > seem to find anything but occasional references to a
> > paper on the "Programmer's Memorandum Macros" (troff -mm)
> > by Smith and Mashey.
>
> The source code for this paper had been available as part
> of the System III distribution under the old (unfree) SCO
> license.
>
> In case you had applied for that license, and you still
> have an old PUPS archive CD at hand, you can find it in
> Distributions/usdl/SysIII/sys3.tar.gz.
>
> You will not be able to recover the original layout since
> PostScript font metrics are quite different from CAT ones,
> but Heirloom troff produces readable output at least.
>
> Gunnar
> >But the point being made was that I've been around the block, I've worked
> >on and/or looked hard at many different Unix variants and I'm not at all sad
> >to see them go.
>
> Why are you here then?
Good question. I like it here, I like old Unix. I have little fondness
for all the commercial unices, see http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html
for my reasons.
I think you may be confusing my dislike for commercial unix with a dislike
for unix. If so, that's mistake because I love Unix. I've dedicated a
huge portion of my life to helping unix as best I can.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.comhttp://www.bitkeeper.com
On Mon, 22 May 2006, 19:38:21 -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
>But the point being made was that I've been around the block, I've worked
on and/or looked hard at many different Unix variants and I'm not at all sad
to see them go.
Why are you here then?
It's a fact that many of the big-gun Unix vendors have moved on but Unix
development continues to persist, so don't put it down yet. Unix is still
very much alive and kicking. Unix has been around forever and the Unicies
that remain still offer enough diversions to mix up the market and make
things interesting for us all. If Linux was the only Unix like system out
there then what would happen if Linux went belly-up. It could easily
happen if the big Linux vendors Redhat, Suse etc went to the dogs. Having
other Unix systems out their competing with each other as well as Linux is
healthy.
Hello everyone, I'm just trying to get into PDP-11 Unix.
I have a couple older machines lying around not doing much (a SPARCstation 4
and an Ultra 1), and I've been fiddling around with the simh pdp11 and
2.11BSD on the Ultra 1. I can get the system to boot using the
211bsd.simhconfig file from the tarball here:
http://ftp.gcu-squad.org/tuhs/PDP-11/Boot_Images/2.11_on_Simh/
I can boot into what appears to be a workable system, but I'd like to have
networking and a larger hard drive. Can somebody help me out with getting
this set up? If anybody else out there has done the same thing, I'd like to
hear exactly what you did.
Thank you very much
John F.
Does anyone know how to compile gcc-3.4.6 for the pdp11? I use
the --target=pdp11 switch and the compiler runs for awhile then breaks. The
output says it's bulding for a pdp11-unknown something so there maybe
something I'm not using.
Bill
> Michael Sokolov, it was, that writted:
> [stuff]
>
> ====
>
> You silly, twisted boy, you.
Indeed. Michael does not seem to have been taking his meds. Nice guy but
a bit out there.
Tim wrote:
> A good example would probably be SunOS 4 - we already know that Sun are
> quite interested in open sourcing stuff given OpenSolaris, but SunOS 4
> hasn't been, presumably because it is full of stuff-they-don't-own and has
> no commercial value at all.
I'm the guy who took SunOS 4.1.3 and removed all the non-free stuff from it
(which was 90% STREAMS) and demo-ed it to McNealy in effort to set it free.
A lot went into this: http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html
There isn't much chance they'll release it and at this point it is so far
behind I'm not sure I see the point. Even though that is the one kernel
that I really loved.
> From: Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy(a)optushome.com.au>
> SMP support started earlier than 4.1.4. The sun4m machines (SS470,
> SS670) were the first SMP machines and ISTR they were supported in
Um, search google groups for lm@slovax - that was a 470. It was most
definitely not an SMP box though it was my favorite Sun machine. Great
machine, my home machine is still named slovax in honor of that box (which
was named slovax in honor of a Wisconsin 11/750 that held the 4.x BSD source
which taught me more than anything else).
And for those who care, slovax/470 now belongs to Theo Deraadt, I'm
ashamed to say that I sold it to him so I could buy some parts for my
VW van at the time. At the time I didn't have any money, if I could do
it over again I would have given it to him.
The 670 was an SMP, that's Chuck Narad's box. Pretty nice except that
bcopy performance was really bad.
-----
But the bigger point I wanted to make was to react to all the stuff about
OSF/1 or Ultrix or Tru64 or AIX or whatever. Most of you probably have
no idea who I am or what we do. I run a company that makes a software
product which runs on all those old Unix platforms. We have all the
boxen with all the various Unix versions.
Other than SunOS 4.x, if they all fell off the face of the earth tomorrow
I couldn't be happier. They suck. And even SunOS sucks in some ways, it's
way behind Linux. I'm a file system guy, I'm the last guy who did anything
significant to UFS (ask Kirk), and I have to admit that the Linux guys are
in some ways running circles around the old school Unix guys. The one
exception (that I know of) is ZFS. That's pretty cool, the Linux guys
are unlikely to do anything that good, it's too complex.
But my point is that the love for the old unix versions is mostly
misplaced. V7, you bet. That teaches you "small" (as does Comer's
Xinu work). But all of the vendor Unices, even my beloved SunOS, pale in
comparison to Linux. Sad but true, I've spent a lot of time in the code.
And in some ways it isn't sad at all, it's cool. Linux is free.
The only sad part that I still see is maybe personal. I loved SunOS
because working in it, as a young kid, I didn't know shit. But there
I was, hacking away. When I started, wandering through the code made
me feel like I was in a fog, I couldn't see the next step. But as time
went on the fog cleared and I saw this very clear and clean architecture.
It became something that you could really see and see why it was that
way and see how you could extend it and see how you shouldn't extend it.
The generic kernel source (take away drivers and file system
implementations, but keep the VFS layer) is very small. I've lived for
many years in SunOS, I've lived in IRIX, I've lived in SCO (which is
more true to V7 than anything else), I've lived in Linux, I've read the
HP-UX code, I haven't read Ultrix, OSF/1 or AIX, but the ones I know,
they are all pretty simple. The only one that ever cleared the fog for
me was SunOS, all the other ones looked like a mess which is why I don't
share the sentiment that we should be crying over the loss of all the
vendor Unices.
I don't want to go back. Linux is pretty nice. Maybe they'll fuck it
up, that seems to be a Unix OS tradition, but so far so good.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.comhttp://www.bitkeeper.com
> I couldn't be happier. They suck. And even SunOS sucks in some ways, it's
> way behind Linux. I'm a file system guy, I'm the last guy who did anything
> significant to UFS (ask Kirk), and I have to admit that the Linux guys are
As Mike H pointed out, Kirk has been more busy than I remembered and has been
busy in UFS, so I retract that.
That point made, I think the general point that I was making, which is that
the Linux guys seem to be moving faster, is still valid. I'm very fond of
UFS and have a lot of respect for Kirk, so it's not about that, it's just
that the energy seems to be elsewhere. For better or worse.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.comhttp://www.bitkeeper.com
Perhaps an OSF1-"lite", on par with 4.4BSD-Lite which had the
copyrighted code removed, would be possible to get released. Of course,
HP would have to have a motive in doing so.
All of this, the closing of UNX, the loss of the VAX and now the dying
of the Alpha chip, is very disheartening. Although I'm lucky enough to
have access to 5 VAXen (running 4.3 BSD UNIX and one running Ultrix4),
it's tough for anyone to learn and play with this stuff, because they
are becoming so scarce (you can by a VaxStation/MicroVax on eBay, but
these will only run Ultrix and not 4.3 BSD, unfortunately).
I also am very disappointed about the abandoning of the Alpha chip.
>From it's start I was very impressed with it. It was a very good RISC
architecture, and the first to really do 64-bit computing, and do it
well. Before they decided to kill it, it was still the best
architecture for 64-bit computing on the market.
Even though I'm pro-open-source, I also can't help but lament losing
many of the commercial Unices over the past few years. The next version
of HP-UX will apparently be the last, PA-RISC is dying along with Alpha,
so presumably OSF1/Digital UNIX/Tru64 is either dead or end-of-lifed as
well, IRIX has moved to x86 (the platform I tend to loathe the most,
probably because I know it best and learned it first), AIX is still
around but IBM is focussing strongly on Linux, and Solaris is still
around (but they did kill SunOS 4.1.4 -- personally one of my favorite
Unices of all time, basically 4.3 BSD + Sun stuff such as OpenWindows +
nice improvements such as loadable kernel modules + pcc ported to
SPARC).
Not to mention all the mid-to-late 80's versions of UNIX -- Interactive,
AT&T System V (actually branded as that, uname -a returned
UNIX_System_V), as well as a ton of others I'm forgetting.
I guess I'm somewhat nostoglic about old UNIX, and I enjoy seeing it's
evolution. That's why whenever I'm able to view the source code of some
closed-source UNIX, it's very enjoyable to me. Old UNIX has a rustic
appeal to me.
It's unfortunate that it seems we must resign ourselves to a future of
x86-based OSs, such as Linux, or even Open/Free/NetBSD, which aren't
really UNIX (Linux definitely isn't, and the modern BSDs have changed
enough that they also aren't IMO).
It seems there's no diversity anymore, both in software and hardware.
It's amazing how x86 (an inferior architecture) could win the war of
architectures when it was basically a bastardized version of the VAX
(the best CISC chip ever, IMO). There were so many superior
architectures out there, such as SPARC, MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, POWER,
PowerPC, and VAX. For x86 to win, really shows that the quality of
technology in a product really has no bearing on how it will do in the
market. It's not about quality, it's about profitability, and they are
very often not the same.
While IA-64 is based on the PA-RISC, it's still Intel, and the choice of
operating systems for it is still going to be limited to the handful
previously mentioned. Apple's move away from a RISC architecture
(PowerPC) to x86 is just as disheartening.
Oh well. I guess we are nearing the finish-line of this "race to the
bottom", because of the capitalistic influence on the computer industry.
My advice to anyone interested in UNIX (and computer architecture)
history is to stock up on machines now, while you can still find them on
places like eBay. Some of the newer-but-still-dead architectures such
as SGI/MIPS are numerous on eBay. Although, be careful when buying on
eBay, because many times you'll get a banged up, stripped of components,
unworking shell of one of the slower models of a system. This is
particularly true when trying to acquire a SparcStation on eBay. Good
luck trying to find a 2way SparcStation 20 with a nice size hard drive
and lots of RAM (the fastest machine SunOS 4.1.4 could run on -- and
I've heard that 4.1.4 did have very alpha SMP support, similar to what
Linux and the modern BSDs used for a long time, that being a "big giant
lock" [mutex] around the kernel).
...Jon
-----Original Message-----
From: tuhs-bounces(a)minnie.tuhs.org [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org]
On Behalf Of patv(a)monmouth.com
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 2:40 PM
To: Lyrical Nanoha; tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Bell Labs Holmdel site coming down
I have heard some grumblings of TOG possibly releasing CDE as open
source, but have no idea of where that stands. To be perfectly frank,
it had a lot of problems, especially in a 64-bit world. There were too
many word size assumptions, and a very good friend struggled for many,
many hours fixing those problems before it went to DEIL in India for
support. It could probably still benefit from a good "many eyes"
developer review and bug fix session in the hands of open source
developers. However, IMHO, it no longer has any advantage over KDE or
Gnome, but, as I said, that is my opinion.
Personally, I'd love to see OSF1 released open source. There were
experimental x86 and two Itanium versions in various states of
completion floating around DEC/Compaq/HP. I was part of the last
Itanium effort before the HP merger. That one booted to single user
before the project was killed.
OSF1/Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX was already branded as UNIX, and it would
be fun to see what would happen to the landscape if a branded UNIX was
free.
Unfortunately, too many proprietary licensed pieces of code in the HP
version, especially in System V support, for that to ever happen. Oh
well, we can all dream ...
Pat
> On Wed, 17 May 2006, patv(a)monmouth.com wrote:
>
> > Another loss to the UNIX community that I can personally report was
> > the closing, one year ago this month, of the old DEC Manalpan
facility (UNX).
> > This was the home of VAX System V, a large portion of Ultrix, and
> > everything that made up OSF1/Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX except for
> > kernel, drivers, and several other components (although I personally
> > did some kernel work on occasion). We did shell and utilities,
> > about 1/2 of X, Motif, CDE, installation, mail, and other parts of
> > the OS that made it useful. If you look at old uucp headers
> > anywhere on usenet, any of the traffic with headers that included
> > systems with "unx" in the name was routed through this facility. I
> > was there from when it was Digital through Compaq and finally HP,
almost all the way through to the closing.
>
> It would be nice if CDE were free, the rest is either part of the
> Heirloom project or cloned in some open-source system (e.g., Lesstif).
> --;
>
> -uso.
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
---------------------------------------------
This message was sent using Monmouth Internet MI-Webmail.
http://www.monmouth.com/
>
> I don't want to go back. Linux is pretty nice. Maybe they'll fuck it
> up, that seems to be a Unix OS tradition, but so far so good.
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com
I hate when these discussions become religious. What I initially said was
I'd love to see what would happen if a TOG branded UNIX were open source.
As for which one, I don't really care. It doesn't matter which. The
hypothetical scenario is if suddenly there was a "Open Source UNIX" out
there, what would happen to all the FUD and other marketing spin?
This hypothetical OS could easily be a Linux based GNU distribution,
almost any BSD, or some other OS out there. I just mentioned OSF/1 because
it already has been branded UNIX.
Pat
---------------------------------------------
This message was sent using Monmouth Internet MI-Webmail.
http://www.monmouth.com/
Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)tfeb.org> wrote:
> A good example would probably be SunOS 4 - we already know that Sun are
> quite interested in open sourcing stuff given OpenSolaris, but SunOS 4
> hasn't been [...]
Yes it has been open sourced, albeit by force since they refused to do
it voluntarily:
ifctfvax.Harhan.ORG:/pub/UNIX/thirdparty/SunOS/sunos-414-source.tar.gz
SF
Michael Sokolov, it was, that writted:
Then why don't YOU release it as open source? Yes, you personally.
Pull out your personal copy of the source (I sure hope you've had enough
brains to smuggle one home with you when you left HP/Comfuq), put it on
a bunch of Free Software FTP sites (IFCTF would gladly host it), and
announce it to the world. And while you are at it, shoot a few cops and
hang their heads on a wall as war trophys (in the humanity's war for
liberation of all software, of course).
====
You silly, twisted boy, you.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Idiot Connoisseur
I have heard some grumblings of TOG possibly releasing CDE as open source,
but have no idea of where that stands. To be perfectly frank, it had a
lot of problems, especially in a 64-bit world. There were too many word
size assumptions, and a very good friend struggled for many, many hours
fixing those problems before it went to DEIL in India for support. It
could probably still benefit from a good many eyes developer review and
bug fix session in the hands of open source developers. However, IMHO, it
no longer has any advantage over KDE or Gnome, but, as I said, that is my
opinion.
Personally, Id love to see OSF1 released open source. There were
experimental x86 and two Itanium versions in various states of completion
floating around DEC/Compaq/HP. I was part of the last Itanium effort
before the HP merger. That one booted to single user before the project
was killed.
OSF1/Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX was already branded as UNIX, and it would be
fun to see what would happen to the landscape if a branded UNIX was free.
Unfortunately, too many proprietary licensed pieces of code in the HP
version, especially in System V support, for that to ever happen. Oh well,
we can all dream
Pat
> On Wed, 17 May 2006, patv(a)monmouth.com wrote:
>
> > Another loss to the UNIX community that I can personally report was the
> > closing, one year ago this month, of the old DEC Manalpan facility (UNX).
> > This was the home of VAX System V, a large portion of Ultrix, and
> > everything that made up OSF1/Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX except for kernel,
> > drivers, and several other components (although I personally did some
> > kernel work on occasion). We did shell and utilities, about 1/2 of X,
> > Motif, CDE, installation, mail, and other parts of the OS that made it
> > useful. If you look at old uucp headers anywhere on usenet, any of the
> > traffic with headers that included systems with "unx" in the name was
> > routed through this facility. I was there from when it was Digital
> > through Compaq and finally HP, almost all the way through to the closing.
>
> It would be nice if CDE were free, the rest is either part of the Heirloom
> project or cloned in some open-source system (e.g., Lesstif). --;
>
> -uso.
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
>
---------------------------------------------
This message was sent using Monmouth Internet MI-Webmail.
http://www.monmouth.com/
patv(a)monmouth.com wrote:
> Personally, I^Rd love to see OSF1 released open source.
Then why don't YOU release it as open source? Yes, you personally.
Pull out your personal copy of the source (I sure hope you've had enough
brains to smuggle one home with you when you left HP/Comfuq), put it on
a bunch of Free Software FTP sites (IFCTF would gladly host it), and
announce it to the world. And while you are at it, shoot a few cops and
hang their heads on a wall as war trophys (in the humanity's war for
liberation of all software, of course).
You've also mentioned in another post about good jobs in your area going
away. Why don't you offer your technical skills and expertise to Iran?
I'm sure your engineering expertise would be useful to their nuclear
weapons program, and you could thus put your skills to serve a good
cause, helping make missiles to annihilate evil copyrighting nations.
Space Falcon,
Programletarian Freedom Fighter,
Interplanetary Internationale
Just a personal commentary on that article from the local newspaper.
I live in Freehold, a few miles from the Holmdel facility, and I used to
work in Holmdel some time back. I worked on several 68K based boards used
in a product called DACS. I worked on both hardware and firmware,
maintained UNIX for several groups, struggled with nmake and software
manufacturing for several products (bugging both Glenn Fowler and David
Korn when new nmake releases broke builds), supported the pcc compiler as
a cross compiler, etc., for DACS and other products. I was also
responsible for the architecture of something called the Line Monitoring
Equipment (LME), used in some undersea cable systems, well before
Submarine Systems was sold off to Tyco. I can't tell you how many hours I
spent in that building. It was fun.
Another loss to the UNIX community that I can personally report was the
closing, one year ago this month, of the old DEC Manalpan facility (UNX).
This was the home of VAX System V, a large portion of Ultrix, and
everything that made up OSF1/Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX except for kernel,
drivers, and several other components (although I personally did some
kernel work on occasion). We did shell and utilities, about 1/2 of X,
Motif, CDE, installation, mail, and other parts of the OS that made it
useful. If you look at old uucp headers anywhere on usenet, any of the
traffic with headers that included systems with "unx" in the name was
routed through this facility. I was there from when it was Digital
through Compaq and finally HP, almost all the way through to the closing.
In general, the whole area is undergoing a massive transition. If I had
to guess, I'd say it is mostly due to the downswing in telecom, followed
closely by the closing of Fort Monmouth. The latter, I think, is the
death blow for technology in this region.
For hardware developers, not much left at all around the area, and
software people have to either go financial in NYC, or work for a
pharmaceutical or insurance company. Not much room left for innovation
here. Sad.
Pat
>
> http://app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060430/BUSINESS/604300358/1003
>
> Coming down
>
> The developer buying Lucent Technologies' 472-acre campus in Holmdel
> plans to tear down the massive 2-million-square-foot research center
> that has been home to Bell Labs for the past 44 years.
> Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 04/30/06
> BY DAVID P. WILLIS
> BUSINESS WRITER
---------------------------------------------
This message was sent using Monmouth Internet MI-Webmail.
http://www.monmouth.com/
http://app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060430/BUSINESS/604300358/1003
Coming down
The developer buying Lucent Technologies' 472-acre campus in Holmdel
plans to tear down the massive 2-million-square-foot research center
that has been home to Bell Labs for the past 44 years.
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 04/30/06
BY DAVID P. WILLIS
BUSINESS WRITER
As the sale of Lucent Technologies' behemoth Bell Labs research center
on Crawfords Corner Road in Holmdel moves forward, one thing seems certain.
Preferred Real Estate Investments Inc., a developer that specializes in
redeveloping obsolete buildings and properties, will knock down the 2
million-square-foot structure, one of the largest office buildings in
New Jersey.
"I have walked through that building a dozen times. It is a crime that
we can't figure out a way to reuse this building," said Michael G.
O'Neill, founder and chief executive officer of Preferred Real Estate
Investments. "There is just no way. It is just absolutely and utterly
unusable."
The way the building was designed, using concrete structural walls and
hallways that run along the outside of the building, makes it impossible
to redevelop, O'Neill said. "It was built for a single purpose that no
longer exists," he said.
The company has not yet determined how it will take down the building.
The large ponds on the property, as well as its road system, will be
used by the developer.
Lucent is selling the six-story building to Preferred for an undisclosed
price. On Thursday, Lucent spokesman John Skalko said a closing on the
deal is "imminent."
The original building opened in 1962 and was expanded in 1964 and 1982.
It was once home to as many as 5,600 employees. But only 1,054 work
there now as Lucent has cut jobs and spun off businesses. The company
plans to move the remaining workers to offices in Murray Hill and
Whippany by the end of August 2007 as it seeks to make the most use of
its real estate holdings.
Meanwhile, Preferred Real Estate Investments, a developer based in
Conshohocken, Pa., said it will involve township officials and residents
to come up with a plan for the 472-acre property.
Neighbor Barbara Daly said she would like to see any future development
limited to the building's current location on the large property.
She also worried about traffic. Even at its height, Lucent's staggered
work hours kept traffic down, said Daly, who has lived in Holmdel for 14
years.
"Part of the charm of Holmdel is the rural feeling," said Daly. "I don't
think we need structures visible from Crawfords Corner Road or Roberts
Road."
Holmdel resident Teresa M. Graw said the property should continue to be
used for office and laboratory space by high-tech companies.
"Any new construction should go forward with an understanding and
respect for the beautiful open spaces, panoramic views and high
environmental quality that the property offers, for these attributes are
truly what will continue to bring the most added value to the property
in the long run," Graw said in an e-mail.
The design of the new buildings could take into account the
architectural significance of the original, she said. It was designed by
Finnish architect Eero Saarinen, the designer of the Gateway Arch in St.
Louis, and is encased in a shell of reflective glass.
"It seems to me that they have to somehow capture that, the history, the
flavor of the property's past," Graw said.
O'Neill said there is no formal plan yet for the property. The company
does not contemplate any industrial, retail or high-density residential
housing development there.
"This property is a magnificent setting for corporate users," O'Neill
said. "While the buildings are antiquated, the site should be very, very
attractive."
Preferred also would keep the property's water tower, designed by
Saarinen, which people say looks like a giant transistor.
"We think that is really neat," O'Neill said. "The significance of
telecommunications shouldn't be forgotten."
He believes any design for the property would include several buildings,
which would total less than 2 million square feet of office space.
He also said they will have to try to explore some other "low density
use," such as age-restricted housing, that may be appropriate for the
site. The property is currently zoned for office and laboratory use. Any
other type of development may require a zoning change, said Christopher
Shultz, the township administrator.
"We know the sensitivity of the open space along the road and the view,"
O'Neill said. "The challenge we have on this site is to maintain that
bucolic feeling, but create something that is economic."
Founded in 1992, Preferred specializes in buying closed properties, such
as manufacturing plants and corporate offices or headquarters, which
were central locations in a town. The company owns properties from
Connecticut to Georgia worth more than $1.5 billion.
"We go in and look at these things that have clearly become antiquated
from what they were," O'Neill said. "We figure out how to design and
envision a new life for those sites."
In Hamilton in Mercer County, Preferred is redeveloping an old toilet
factory formerly owned by American Standard Cos., converting the
World-War-I-era building into 450,000 square feet of office space.
Hamilton Mayor Glen Gilmore said Preferred worked with the township,
creating a building that is filling with tenants.
"They are people who keep their word and are able to take a challenging
project and do something unique with it," Gilmore said of the developer.
In Holmdel, Preferred executives have already introduced themselves to
officials and plan on having a public meeting with residents as well.
Mayor Serena DiMaso said the town is looking forward to working with
Preferred.
The township wants to protect its tax base, DiMaso said. Lucent, the
township's largest taxpayer, paid $3.19 million in taxes last year on
the property, which is assessed at $98.5 million.
"We made them understand that we need the ratable base to remain as
constant as it can be," DiMaso said. "They (residents) understand that
it cannot be Lucent anymore. They are willing to make the compromise for
something else."
The mayor said she would like to see it continue to be a development
with office or laboratory space. Preferred is aware of the township's
commitment to open space, she said.
Township Committeeman Terence Wall said he envisions a corporate campus
that does not include housing. The property also could include space for
a library and offices for the board of education, which are now located
in town hall, he said.
"They can achieve the return on the investment that they require without
a housing component," Wall said.
Before the sale was announced last month, Holdmel's elected officials
had asked the township's planner to look at the best uses for the
property, including those that may require a zoning change, said
Schultz. The planner also will look at whether the state's redevelopment
law applies to the property.
