16 May
2025
16 May
'25
5:57 p.m.
below.
On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 12:01 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)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.
ᐧ