And now, we bring the RMS/Gnu thread to a close :-)
To kick a more relevant thread off, what was the "weirdest" Unix system you used & why? Could be an emulation like Eunice, could be the hardware e.g NULL was not zero, NUXI byte ordering etc.
Cheers, Warren
--
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
> From: Don Hopkins
> Solaris: so bad I left the company.
Why was Solaris so much worse than SunOS?
I guess the Sun management didn't understand that was the case? Or were they
so hot for the AT+T linkup that they were willing to live with it?
Noel
As I've said elsewhere, Sun was out of money. AT&T bought $200m of Sun
stock at 35% over market but Sun had to dump SunOS and got to SVR4.
I don't know if Scooter knew what he was dumping or not, I suspect not
but all those late nights when he came over to egg us kernel geeks on,
maybe he did know. I don't think he had a choice.
On Sun, Oct 01, 2017 at 12:59:42PM -0400, Arthur Krewat via TUHSmangle wrote:
> From Sun's point of view, what was the REAL reason to move from SunOS to
> Solaris?
>
> I don't think I've read anything anywhere as to a real technical reason. Was
> it just some stuffed-shirt's "great idea"?
>
> Or was it really a standards-based or other reality-based reason?
>
> As of SunOS 4.1.4, it seemed ready to go whole-hog into SMP, so that wasn't
> the sole reason.
>
> thanks!
> art k.
>
>
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.comhttp://www.mcvoy.com/lm
I’m an HPC guy. The only good OS is one that is not executing any instructions except mine. No daemons, no interrupts, nothing. Load my code, give me all physical memory, give me direct access to the interconnect and then get out of the way. If I want anything, I will let you know, but don’t wait up.
When I put on an educator’s hat I still have a soft spot for V6 and V7. Those were my first exposure to Unix and the Unix Way. One could actually learn style by reading code and writing device drivers. These days kernels (Linux at least) are too complicated and too cluttered up with ifdefs to learn much. The real recent innovations like RCU and queuing locks and NUMA affinity are buried pretty deep, and actual reliable file systems like ZFS and BTRFS are just too complicated for mortals.
As a user, what I really want are reliability, the commands and utilities, and stable APIs. I don’t like a lot of things about Posix, but it is at least a little stable and a little portable. For myself, I use MacOS and Debian Linux, and open, close, read, write.
-Larry
On Sun, 1 Oct 2017, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
> Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2017 09:13:28 -0600
> Michael Parson <mparson(a)bl.org> wrote:
>
>> On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
>>> On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
>>>
>>>> I've recently found instructions for installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
>>>> qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
>>>
>>> Can you share a pointer to those with us?
>>
>> Sure:
>>
>> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4
>>
>> Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :)
>
> So then the next question is where can one find install media (or
> image thereof...)
I bought a boxed copy of 'Solaris 1.1.2' off e-bay many moon ago,
though I've been told it can be found with the google search term of
'winworldpc'.
--
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ
On Sep 28, 2017 11:02 PM, "Kevin Bowling" <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com> wrote:
What is your favorite UNIX. Three possible categories, choose one or more:
1) Free
2) Forced to use a commercial platform. I guess that could include
macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
3) Historical
1. FreeBSD. It's super stable and tends to be logical. The documentation is great once you get over the learning curve. Debian is a close second for the same reasons. Mint with KDE Plasma 5 is beautiful and user friendly.
2. I used Sun OS with a CDE-like interface back in the day and that was ok. Mac OS X 10.5-10.12 are great.
3. I enjoy the research versions of unix and other OSes that are available for the SimH PDP 11 emulator.
Will
On Sun, Sep 3, 2017 at 11:08 AM, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 2, 2017 at 8:54 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 2 Sep 2017, Nemo wrote:
>>
>> Hhhmmm... This begs the historical question: When did LF replace CR/LF
>>> in UNIX?
>>>
>>
>> Unix has always used NL as the terminator :-)
>
>
> <CR><LF> was the line terminator in DEC operating systems that grew up
> around the same time as Unix. CP/M and MS-DOS inherited that from them
> since those systems were developed, in part, using cross compilers running
> on DEC gear with DEC OSes. Unix came from the Multics world where LF was
> used as the line terminator... Thankfully, neither CP/M nor MS-DOS picked
> up DEC's RMS...
>
> Warner
>
​The fun story on that Warner is after years of dogged defense of RMS, when
C was written for VMS, Cutler had to add Stream I/O. The moment is was
released, much (?most?) of customer base (including a lot of internal folks
like the compiler runtime and DB folks) switched to using it. It was so
much easier.​ I never heard Dave back down, but it I used to smile when I
saw the statistics.
What is your favorite UNIX. Three possible categories, choose one or more:
1) Free
2) Forced to use a commercial platform. I guess that could include
macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
3) Historical
Me:
1) FreeBSD - I find it to generally be the least annoying desktop and
laptop experience with admittedly careful selection of hardware to
ensure compatibility. It's ideal to me for commercial appliances and
servers due to the license, tight coupling of kernel and base, and
features like ZFS, jails, and pluggable TCP stacks. Linux distros
lost their luster for me once systemd was integrated into Debian, and
that kind of culture seems to be prevailing up and down the stack in a
way that I'd prefer to be an outside observer of Linux and not
dependent on it for now.
2) AIX - I often see people disparage AIX but I like it. I learned a
lot in my teens about C, build systems, compilers, and lots of
libraries trying to port random software to it for auto-didactic
reasons. It definitely doesn't feel like any other UNIX. It probably
supports high core count and NUMA better than any other system except
Linux, it had advanced virtualization with LPARs and containers with
WPARs before most and hot patchable kernel, fully pagable kernel, lots
of rigorous kernel engineering there that didn't get a lot of fanfare.
SMIT is kind of cool as a TUI and spits out commands that you can
learn through repetition and use at the CLI or scripting. I think it
probably peaked in the early 2000s, but the memory management, volume
management, and file systems all seemed pretty forward thinking up
until then. I don't think SMP performance was a strong suite until it
was pretty much a relegated niche though.
3) IRIX - it just screams '90s cool like an acrylic sweater. Soft
real time, immense graphics support, pro audio and video features,
lots of interesting commercial software, NUMA, supercomputers. I
enjoy tinkering on this still, but a lot of that is due to the neat
hardware.
Regards,
Kevin
Warner Losh:
It's an abundance of caution thing. This code had security problems in the
past, we're not 100% sure that we've killed all the issues, though we
believe we have.
====
And if there isn't anyone who's actively interested in the
code, willing to dig in to clean it up and make security
issues less likely, deal with multiprocessing matters, and
so on, that's a perfectly reasonable stance.
I think it's an unfortunate result, and I wonder how much
of it comes from a cultural view that sysctl >> /proc.
(Recall how Ken and Dennis originally resisted Doug's push
for pipelines and filters, because--as Dennis once put it
in a talk--it just wasn't the way programs worked?)
But as someone who is sometimes credited with removing
more code than he wrote while working on the latter-day
Research kernel, it's hard for me to argue with the principle.
A lot of the code I tossed out was complicated stuff that
was barely used if used at all, and that nobody was willing
to step up to volunteer to maintain.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
