11 May
2022
11 May
'22
11:35 p.m.
On Wed, May 11, 2022 at 12:44:10PM -0400, Paul Winalski wrote:
Many of the Ultrix
engineers had a religious belief in keeping Unix pure and
platform-independent. Things available on only one hardware platform
were perceived as "vendor traps" and to be avoided.
Not unique to DEC, I very much had that attitude at Sun and wasn't alone.
As a side effort from making SunOS POSIX compliant, I wrote lint libraries
for BSD, Sys III, Sys V, POSIX, and I don't remember what else. The idea
was that you could use Sun as a dev platform but lint your code against
whatever platform you wanted to target.
It was misguided, I bet I can count on one hand the number of people that
used any of those, but I hated vendor traps as much as DEC, maybe more.