12 May
2022
12 May
'22
6:16 a.m.
I don't think you were misguided. I do think Ultrix was a contained
problem for code portability, probably because enough pre-existing
code came into Sun, it was a compiler toolchain pre-motivated to work
in Vax architecture machinecode.
HP-UX on the other hand, and Apollos unix under Domain/OS, I recall as
a nightmare. I regularly had to try and get current spec sendmail
working on these, because both platforms were in use in Chemical
Engineering and NMR related contexts as device controller and display
platforms in the uni I worked in. Portable code onto these worlds, was
frankly horrid: HP believed a single -lcompat type library provided
everything you needed when in fact, #include path hell was inches
away.
Unisys was freaky bad. Their native IPv4 format for an address used
comma, not dot as the dotted-quad separator.
On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 3:35 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
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.