One significant area of non compliance with unix conventions is its non
case sensitive filesystem (HFS and variants like HFS+ if I recall). I think
this is partly for historical reasons to make Classic / MacOS9 emulation
easier during the transition. But I could never understand why they did
this, they could have put case insensitivity in their shell and apps
without breaking the filesystem.
Anyway despite its being unix I can't really see it gaining much traction
with serious unix users (when did you last get a 404 from a major website
with a tagline "Apache running on MacOSX"?), the MacPorts and Fink repos
are a really bad and patchy implementation of something like
apt/ctan/cpan/etc (I think possibly at least one of those repos builds from
source with attendant advantages/problems), it does not support X properly,
the dylibs are non standard, everything is a bit broken compared with Linux
(or FreeBSD) and Apple does not really have the motivation or the manpower
to create a modern, clean system like unix users expect.
Open sourcing Darwin was supposed to open it up to user contributed
enhancements but Apple was never serious about this, it was just a sop to
people who claimed (correctly) that Apple was riding on the back of open
source and giving nothing back to the community. Since Apple refused to
release any important code like drivers or bootstrap routines the Darwin
release was never really any more useable than something like 4.4BSDLite.
People who loved their Macs and loved unix and dreamed of someday running
the Mac UI on top of a proper unix, put significant effort into supplying
the missing pieces but were rebuffed by Apple at every turn, Apple would
constantly make new releases with even more missing pieces and breakage and
eventually stopped making any open source releases at all, leaving a lot of
people crushed and very bitter.
As for me I got on the Apple bandwagon briefly in 2005 or so, at that time
I was experimenting with RedHat but my primary development machines were
Windows 98 and 2000 (occasionally XP). My assessment was RedHat was not
ready for desktop use, since I had trouble with stuff like printers and
scanners that required me to stay with Windows (actually this was probably
surmountable but I did not have the knowledge or really the desire to spend
time debugging it). That's why I selected Apple as a "compromise unix"
which should connect to my devices easily. I got enthusiastic and spent a
good $4k on new hardware. Shortly afterwards Apple announced the Intel
transition so I realized my brand new gear would soon be obsolete and
unsupported. I was still pretty happy though. Two things took the shine off
eventually (a) I spilt champagne on my machine, tore it down to discover my
beautiful and elegant and spare (on the outside) machine was a horrible
hodgepodge of strange piggyback PCBs and third party gear (on the inside),
this apparently happened because options like the backlit keyboard had
become standard equipment at some point but Apple had never redesigned them
into the motherboard, the whole thing was horribly complicated and fragile
and never worked well after the teardown (b) I got seriously into FreeBSD
and Linux and soon discovered the shortcomings of the Mac as a serious
development machine, everything was just slightly incompatible leading to
time waste.
Happily matters have improved a lot. Lately I was setting up some Windows 7
and 10 machines for my wife to use MS Office on for her uni work. Both had
serious driver issues like "The graphics card has crashed and recovered".
And on the Windows 10 machine, despite it being BRAND NEW out of the box
and manufacturer preloaded, the wifi also did not work, constantly crashed
requiring a reboot. Windows Update did not fix these problems. Downloading
and trying various updated drivers from the manufacturer's website seems to
have for now, except on the Windows 7 machine where the issue is noted and
listed as "won't fix" because the graphics card is out of date, the fixed
driver won't load on this machine. Given this seems to be the landscape
even for people who are happy to spend the $$ on the official manufacturer
supported Windows based solutions, Linux looks pretty easy to install and
use by comparison. Not problem free, but may have fewer problems and easier
to fix problems.
It appears to me that with the growing complexity of the hardware due to
the millions of compatibility layers and ad hoc protocols built into it,
the job of the manufacturers and official OS or driver writers gets harder
and harder, whereas the crowdsourced principle of open source shows its
value since the gear is better tested in a wider variety of realistic
situations.
cheers, Nick
On Jan 1, 2017 9:46 AM, "David" <david(a)kdbarto.org> wrote:
> On Dec 31, 2016, at 8:58 AM, tuhs-request(a)minnie.tuhs.org wrote:
>
> From: Michael Kjörling <michael(a)kjorling.se>
> To: tuhs(a)tuhs.org
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Historic Linux versions not on kernel.org
> Message-ID: <20161231111339.GK576(a)yeono.kjorling.se>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> I might be colored by the fact that I'm running Linux myself, but I'd
> say that those are almost certainly worth preserving somehow,
> somewhere. Linux and OS X are the Unix-like systems people are most
> likely to come in contact with these days
MacOS X is a certified Unix (tm) OS. Not Unix-Like.
http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm
It has been so since 10.0. Since 10.5 (Leopard) it has been so noted on the
above Open Group page. The Open Group only lists the most recent release
however.
The Tech Brief for 10.7 (http://images.apple.com/media/us/osx/2012/docs/OSX_
for_UNIX_Users_TB_July2011.pdf) also notes the compliance.
David
I left Digital in 1994, so I don’t know much about the later evolution of the Alphaservers, but 1998 would have been about right for en EV-56 (EV-5 shrink) or EV-6. There’s a Wikipedia article about all the different systems but most of the dates are missing.
The white label parts are all PAL22V10-15s. The 8 square chips are cache SRAMS, and most the the SOIC jellybeans are bus transceivers to connect the CPU to RAM and I/O. The PC derived stuff is in the back corner. There are 16 DIMM slots to make two ranks of 54 bit RAM out of 8-bit DIMMs. We usually ran with a SCSI card, an ethernet, and an 8514 graphics card plugged into the riser.
-L
> On 2017, Jan 5, at 5:55 PM, ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What version of this would I have bought ca. 1998? I had 16 of some kind of Alpha nodes in AMD sockets, interconnected with SCI for encoding videos. I ended up writing and releasing what I think were the first open source drivers for SCI -- it took a long time to get Dolphin to let me release them.
>
> The DIPs with white labels -- are those PALs or somethin? Or are the labels just to cover up part names :-)
>
> On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 2:39 PM Lawrence Stewart <lstewart2(a)gmail.com <mailto:lstewart2@gmail.com>> wrote:
> Alphas in PC boxes! I dug around in the basement and found my Beta (photo attached).
>
> This was from 1992 or 1993 I think. This is an EV-3 or EV-4 in a low profile PC box using pc peripherals. Dave Conroy designed the hardware, I did the console ROMS (BIOS equivalent) and X server, and Tom Levergood ported OSF-1. A joint project of DEC Semiconductor Engineering and the DEC Cambridge Research Lab. I think about 20 were built, and the idea kickstarted a line of low end Alphaservers.
>
> This was a typical Conroy minimalist design, crunching the off-chip caches, PC junk I/O, ISA bus, and 64 MBytes of RAM into this little space. I think one gate array would replace about half of the chips.
>
> -L
>
>
> <IMG_0939.JPG><IMG_0939.JPG>
All, following on from the "lost ports" thread, I might remind you all that
I'm keeping a hidden archive of Unix material which cannot be made public
due to copyright and other reasons. The goal is to ensure that these bits
don't > /dev/null, even if we can't (yet) do anything with them.
If you have anything that could be added to the archive, please let me know.
My rules are: I don't divulge what's in the archive, nor who I got stuff
from. There have been very few exceptions. I have sent copies of the archive
to two important historical computer organisations who must abide by the
same rules. I think I've had one or two individuals who were desperate to
get software to run on their old kit, and I've "loaned" some bits to them.
Anway, that's it. If that seems reasonable to you, and you want an off-site
backup of your bits, I'm happy to look after them for you.
Cheers, Warren
On 4 January 2017 at 13:51, Steve Johnson <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote (in part):
> These rules provided rich fodder for Lint, when it came along, [...]
All this lint talk caused me to reread your Lint article but no
history there. Was there a specific incident that begat lint?
N.
So there are a few ports I know of that I wonder if they ever made it back
into that great github repo.I don't think they did.
harris
gould
That weird BBN 20-bit machine
(20 bits? true story: 5 4-bit modules fit in a 19" rack. So 20 bits)
Alpha port (Tru64)
Precision Architecture
Unix port to Cray vector machines
others? What's the list of "lost machines" look like? Would companies
consider a donation, do you think?
If that Cray port is of any interest I have a thread I can push on maybe.
but another true story: I visited DEC in 2000 or so, as LANL was about to
spend about $120M on an Alpha system. The question came up about the SRM
firmware for Alpha. As it was described to me, it was written in BLISS and
the only machine left that could build it was an 11/750, "somewhere in the
basement, man, we haven't turned that thing on in years". I suspect there's
a lot of these containing oxide oersteds of interest.
ron
(Yes, a repeat, but this momentous event only happens every few years.)
The International Earth Rotation Service has announced that there will be
a Leap Second inserted at 23:59:59 UTC on the 31st December, due to the
earth slowly slowing down. It's fun to listen to see how the time beeps
handle it; will your GPS clock display 23:59:60, or will it go nuts
(because the programmer was an idiot)?
I actually have a recording of the last one, over at
www.horsfall.org/leapsecond.webm (yes, I am a tragic geek),
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
>Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2017 16:41:07 -0500
>From: "Ron Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com>
>To: "'ron minnich'" <rminnich(a)gmail.com>, <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
>Subject: Re: [TUHS] lost ports
>Message-ID: <01c001d266d3$42294820$c67bd860$(a)ronnatalie.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
...
>I did kernel work on the PA for HP also worked on their X server (did a few other X server >over the years).
>The hard part would be finding anybody from these companies who could even remember
>they made computers let alone had UNIX software.
I worked for the computer division in Philips Electronics, DEC,
Compaq, HP, HPE and still remember some of it :-)
I wasn't involved in OS development, but in testing, turnover to
National Sales Organisations, etc. Even now at some customer side I
still have a few aDEC400xP servers from 1992 running SCO UNIX 3.2V4.2
(last update 1999). Also a few AlphaServers with Digital UNIX, Tru64;
finally some Itanium servers with HP-UX 11.23/11.31.
Especially the big/small endian issue gave our customer (and therefore
myself) a few headaches. Imagine getting a chunk of shared memory and
casting pointers assuming the 'system' takes care of alignment. Big
surprise for the customer moving from Tru64 to HP-UX.
I just went looking at the v6 source to confirm a memory, namely that cpp
was only invoked if a # was the first character in the file. Hence, this:
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V6-Snapshot-D…
People occasionally forgot this, and hilarity ensued.
Now I'm curious. Anyone know when that convention ended?
ron
Goodness, I go to sleep, wake up 8 hours later and there's 50 messages in
the TUHS mailing list. Some of these do relate to the history of Unix, but
some are getting quite off-topic.
So, can I get you all to just pause before you send in a reply and ask:
is this really relevant to the history of Unix, and does it contribute
in a meaningful way to the conversation.
Looks like we lost Armando, that's a real shame.
Cheers, Warren
Peter Salus writes "The other innovation present in the Third Edition
was the pipe" ("A Quarter Century of Unix", p. 50). Yet, in the
corresponding sys/ken/sysent.c, the pipe system call seems to be a stump.
1, &fpe, /* 40 = fpe */
0, &dup, /* 41 = dup */
0, &nosys, /* 42 = pipe */
1, ×, /* 43 = times */
On the other hand, the Fourth Edition manual documents the pipe system
call, the construction of pipelines through the shell, and the use of wc
as a filter (without an input file, as was required in the Second Edition).
Would it therefore be correct to say that pipes were introduced in the
Fourth rather than the Third Edition?
