[TUHS] Re: Was the SVID A Foregone Conclusion Pre-usr group?

below. On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 12:01 PM segaloco via TUHS &lt;tuhs(a)tuhs.org <mailto:tuhs@tuhs.org>> wrote: I'm curious if anyone has the scoop on this.  To my knowledge the 1984 /usr/group standard constitutes the earliest attempt at a vendor- neutral UNIX standard.  AT&T then comes along in 1985 with the first issue of the SVID, based largely on SVR2 from what I know. There was a huge marketing campaign, "_/System V. Consider it Standard/ _." But the >>users<<, particularly those weaned on BSD, said "hardly." /usr/group was an attempt to deal with Ultrix, HP-UX, AIX, and, much less, Sys III/V.  SVID came later, and it was an attempt to force it down people's throats. The AT&T folks were sometimes a tad nasty at the POSIX meeting and wanted IEEE to "just use it," and we say, "no.  It's incomplete and just plain wrong is so many places."    The whole tar/cpio stuff from /usr/ group was a great example of the start of it, but even things like trying to define a directory entry was strained.   SVID did not have the new UCB directory system calls. For example, we all were certain that if we ever had a different FS, we needed to remove physical formats from the specification.   There were no sockets, and yet nearly 100% of the working networking code in the wild, including on MS-DOS, was using sockets. The problem was that several people who came to the POSIX meetings post- SVID from AT&T were from marketing and sales. At the same time, the core of the original /usr/group and later POSIX teams were mostly engineering types.   The sales/mktg folks were trying to establish a brand, the engineers were trying to solve an issue were we had code that did not work between our different systems.