27 Jun
2024
27 Jun
'24
2:01 a.m.
I was waiting for Heinz to say something, assuming he would at least say
what he did about the beginnings of POSIX.
Another IEEE standard of great historical import is IEEE 754-1985 for
representing floating point numbers. Many of the 801 people wanted to
preserve IBM Hexadecimal floating point introduced with System/360. One
of my best memories of Phil Hester is his fulfilled promise that 754
would prevail in what became the RS/6000. Charlie
On 6/26/2024 2:34 PM, Heinz Lycklama wrote:
The POSIX Standard for the UNIX System was actually
started under the umbrella of /usr/group, which was
comprised mostly of commercial companies and users
of the UNIX system. /usr/group was the forerunner
of UniForum. I chaired the /usr/group standard from
1981 to 1984, after which we turned the work over
to the IEEE, chaired by Jim Isaac and co-chaired by
myself. I worked for INTERACTIVE Systems Corp,
in Santa Monica, CA- the first commercial UNIX
company that provided for UNIX system software
on the DEC PDP11 and VAX computers, and led the
porting of the UNIX System to many different computer
architectures from micro to mainframe.
Heinz
On 6/26/2024 11:52 AM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
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On Wednesday, June 26th, 2024 at 11:43 AM, James
Johnston
<audioskeptic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
ANSI accredits US standards committees and
delegates, both to US and
International Meetings.
ANSI can vote to accept a standard. While I don't know the issue
behind POSIX, it's entirely possible that ANSI accredited IEEE to
standardize things. They have done this to many various groups for
standards within their wheelhouse. Sometimes this has worked well,
sometimes it has worked to the interest of some particular entity,
speaking as someone who has spent one to many days hanging out in
standards meetings as a "technical expert".
On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 11:35 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Well and that touches on one of the standards that adds some interest
to this discussion: "An American National Standard IEEE Standard
Pascal Computer Programming Language". In this case, ANSI/IEEE 770
X3.97 is the Pascal standard as sponsored by both IEEE *and* ANSI.
The lines can certainly blur. Another example of a language standard
under IEEE is 1076, VHDL. Could it be interpreted as such:
IEEE is one institute among many that may originate the creation and
publication of standards in the field of electrical engineering and
adjacent fields. ANSI, in turn, is a national general standards body
that publishes standards created by groups such as IEEE as well as
those created relatively independently by their own committees such as
X3.
In other words you're liable to have IEEE standards that get tracked
as ANSI, but the likelihood of ANSI cooking something up in their own
committees and then bouncing it out to IEEE is lower if present at all?
- Matt G.
P.S. If anyone wants a trial-use copy of POSIX, there's one sitting on
eBay right now https://www.ebay.com/itm/145798619385
I think historically ANSI did languages.
But, I don't know specifically why IEEE became the standards body
for POSIX. I did participate for a while in the IEEE standards
process (not POSIX, but something else), and I knew it as a large,
very active, well managed organization, always eager to take on new
things (such as the thing that I was engaged in). So maybe that was
one reason.
Maybe a greater reason is that the part of IEEE standards that did
software was chaired by a person from DEC (forgot his name). I'm
sure DEC had a strong interest in a UNIX-based standard, if only to
make sure that it didn't go completely wild and negate DEC's huge
head start in selling machines to run UNIX.
Marc
On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 12:22 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
wrote:
> Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the
> rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the
> publication of UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards. C was published
> via the ANSI route as X3.159, whereas POSIX was instead published
> by the IEEE route as 1003.1. Was there every any consideration of C
> through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI instead? Is there an appreciable
> difference suggested by the difference in publishers? In any case,
> both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track to an
> international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
>
> - Matt G.
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James D. (jj) Johnston
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