8 Apr
2017
8 Apr
'17
3:58 a.m.
Thoth was under development at Waterloo when I was there, and I really
enjoyed talking with those folks. They viewed the parts of the
system as inhabitants of a community and gave them clever names --
this led to some interesting discussions about the distribution of
functions in the kernel. For example, I remember that the guy who
killed processes was called "Big Al", and when the process was dead
the "Undertaker" was called, etc.
There were also some B-inspired languages that got worked on: eh?
was a simpler version of B, and its follow-on was called zed. Don't
know that they ever got out of the university, though...
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: "Wesley Parish" <wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz>
To:"Clem Cole" <clemc(a)ccc.com>
Cc:"The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Sent:Fri, 07 Apr 2017 13:12:21 +1200 (NZST)
Subject:Re: [TUHS] Unix clones
's/DNS/DNA/' - Not a problem. Thanks!
I'd come across Thoth mentioned in an OS book at the U of Canterbury
(NZ) Science Library; they also
had a copy of the Tunis book. But I never took the time to read them.
Getting them put into a time frame is useful - it gives an external
perspective to Salus' book, eg, this is
what some non-Unix folk thought of Unix at the time.
Wesley Parish
Quoting Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com>:
and
and
enough
much
"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." -
Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
Goldwyn
s/DNS/DNA/ - dyslexia sucks....
On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 2:02 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
thread
âtry-II sorry about that...â
On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 9:18 PM, Wesley Parish
<wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz>
> wrote:
>
>> The mention of UNOS a realtime "clone" of Unix in a recent
raises
>> a question for me. How many
>> Unix clones are there?
>>
>
> âAn interesting question.... I'll take a shot at this in a
second,
note
the
there is a Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Unix_
variants that I don't fully agree with.
The problem with all of this question is really depends where you
place
> which boundary on the following continuum:
>
> non-unix add-unix ideas trying to be
> unix might as well be unix research unix
> stream
>
> eg VMS eg Domain eg UNOS
> eg Sys V, BSD/386 & Linux Vx & BSD VAX
>
>
> Different people value different things. So here is my take from > "cloned" systems I used/was basically
aware....
>
> Idris was a V6 clone for the PDP-11, which I saw 1978ish. I can
say I
was able to
recompile code from v6 and it "just worked" so from a
user's
standpoint it might as well has been. But the
compilers and
assemblers
> were different and I never tried anything "hard"
>
> The first attempt to "clone" v7 that I knew about was in France,
> written in Pascal - I think at Ecole Tech in
Paris? The name of
the
> project escapes me, but they presented the work
in the 1979/80
winter
> USENIX (Blackhole) conference in Denver. There
were no
proceedings in
> those days. I believe it also ran on the PDP-11,
but I never ran
it
so; so
> I have no idea how easy it was to move things from Seventh
Edition.
But I
> also don't think they were working binary compatibility, so I
think
it
> landed more toward the center.
>
> The Cruds folks (Goldberg) wrote UNOS shortly there after (early
80s)
> It was definitely not UNIX although it tried to
have be mostly.
We
had
> CRDS box at Masscomp and before I arrived they plan had been to
use it
get
> code working before the RTU was running. But the truth was it
failed
> because it was not UNIX. The 68000 vs Vax issues
were far, far
less of
an
> issue than UNOS != UNIX. To Goldberg's credit, he did have a
couple
of
> cool things in it. I believe only system commercial systems that
used
> Kanodia & Reed's Sequences and
Eventcounts, were UNOS, Apollo
Doman,
and
> Stellar's Stellix (I'm not sure about DG - they might have also
at
one
> point). But these were hidden in the kernel. Also the driver
model he
had was
different, so there was no gain writing drivers there.
Mike Malcom & Dave Cheriton at Waterloo developed Thoth (Thoth -
Thucks),
> which was written in B, IIRC. Ran on the PDP-11 and was very fast light. It was
the first "ukernel" UNIX-like/clone system.. Moving
code
> from V7 was pretty simple and there was attempt to make it good to
> make it easy to move things, but it was not trying to be UNIX so
it
was
PDP-11,
somewhere in the middle.
The Tunis folks seem to have been next. This was more in the left
side
> of the page than the right. I think they did make run on the but
> I'm not so sure how easy it was to move code. If you used their
> concurrent Pascal, I suspect that code moved. But I'm not sure
how
easy it
> was to move a raw K&R "White Book" C code.
>
> CMU's Accent (which was redo of Rochester's RIG) came around the
same
> time. Like Tunis the system language was an
extended Pascal and
in
fact
influence
the target was the triple drip Perq (aka the
Pascalto). The C
compiler
> for it was late, and moving code was difficult, the UNIX was
> clear.
>
> Apollo's Aegis/Domain really came next - about 82/83 ish. Like
Accent
it
but
was written in hacked up Pascal and the command
were in
Ratfor/Fortran
> (from the SW Tool User's Group). C showed up reasonably early, the
> focus did not start trying to be UNIX. In fact, they were very
> successfully and were getting ISV's to abandon VMS for them at a
very
good
> clip. UNIX clearly influenced the system, but it was not trying
to be
UNIX, although
moving code from BSD or V7 could be done fairly
easily.
Tannebaum then did MINIX. Other than 8086 vs PDP-11-ism, it was a
pretty
> darned good clone. You could recompile and most things pretty "just
> worked." He did not support ptrace and few other calls, but as a
basic
V7
> system running on a pure PDP PC, it was remarkably clean. It also
had
a
> large number of languages and it was a great teaching system -
which
is
> what Andy created it be. A problem was that UNIX had moved on by
the
> time Andy released it. So BSD & V8 were now
pretty much the
definition
of
made
"UNIX" - large address spaces were
needed. As were the BSD tools
extensions, such as vi, csh. Also UUCP was now very much in the
thing,
> and while it was a pure v7 clone, it was the lack of "tools" that
it
This
not a good system to "use" and
it's deficiencies out weighed the
value.
Plus as discussed elsewhere, BSD/386 would
appear.
Steve Ward's crew at MIT created TRIX, which was a UNIX-like,
although
> instead of everything being a file, everything was a process. was
> supposed to be the system that rms was originally going to use
for
GNU, but
OS
I never knew what happened. Noel might. I thought
it was a cool
system,
> although it was a mono-kernel and around this time, most of the research
> had gone ukernel happy.
>
> Coherent was announcement and its provenance is questioned,
although
as
> discussed was eventually released from the AT&T official inquiry
and
you
> can look it your self. It was clearly a V7 clone for the PC and
was
more
standpoint.
complete than Minix. I also think they supported
the 386 fairly
quickly,
> which may have made it more interesting from a commercial It
> also had more of the BSD tools available than Minix did when it
was
first
begat
released.
CMU rewrites Accent to create Mach, but this time splices the BSD
kernel
inside of it so that the 4.1BSD binaries
"just work." So it's bit
UNIX
> and a new system all in one. So which is it? This system would > OSF/1 and eventually become Apple's Mac OS?
I think its UNIX, but
one
can
the
claim its not either....
By this point in time the explosion occurs. You have Lion's book,
Andy's
> and Maury Bach's book on the street. he genie is clearly out of bottle,
> and there is a ton of code out there and the DNS is getting all
mixed
up.
> Doug Comer does Xinu, Sheraton does V-kernel, Thoth is rewritten
to
become
> QNX, and a host of others I have not repeated. BSD's CSRG group
would
> break up, BSDi would be created and their 386
code come out. It
was
clearly
"might as well be" if it was not. Soon, Linus would start
with
Minix and the rest is history on the generic
line.
Clem