2 May
2022
2 May
'22
11:59 p.m.
On May 2, 2022, at 10:42 AM, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Mon, May 2, 2022 at 12:16 PM Bakul Shah <bakul(a)iitbombay.org
<mailto:bakul@iitbombay.org>> wrote:
Thoth as students but QNX is not derived from it.
Interesting. Possible I suppose. Derived is probably the operative word here. Of
course, it is also quite possible that I could be miss-remember the conversations, but as
IIRC both Mike Malcolm and Dan Hildebrandt have said to me about the influence of one on
the other when I have spoken with them socially. Also, Kelly (who got the shirt and was
at Waterloo during that time), and was the person that introduced me to Mike in the late
1970s; also said something similar to me.
[I scramble old memories all the time but I seem to remember random facts that are of no
use to me :-)]
FWIW: In the late 1980s, I too used QNX (in C) in a production setting on a 386. Before
that, I had played with Thoth in a grad OS course, but I never ran it significantly.
That said, my point was that Thoth was not trying to be a UNIX look/work alike from an
API standpoint. Thoth, like V, RIG, Accent, et al, were all distinct developments that
learned from the UNIX work but were not trying to emulate it. When QNX was birthed, the
mK was not trying to be UNIX, but they, like Mach later on (after the failure of Accent),
did try to supply an application layer UNIX (and later full POSIX) API.
Indeed. These were all research OSes. The thing that distinguished Unix was the collection
of tools and composability via pipes and shell that made for a very nice development env.
As a grad student I didn't quite appreciate this (not having used Unix) but the
moment I used it, I was sold on it!
From what I remember, A Thoth "team" was about the same as a Unix
"process" and Thoth "process" was a thread in a team. That to me was
the most interesting part about it. Unix got threads much later.
The point that started this thread was when UNIX
emulated.
BTW: I had Ieft out another important Pascal-based UNIX clone. In 1983, Michael Gien
published his work in USENIX on Sol. In the early 1990s, he and his team rewrote that in
C++ to create Chorus.
I remember Sol but by then I had moved on from Pascal.
When OSF announced its long-term strategy for OSF/1
was to be based on Mach; UI announced that the future SVR6 was to be based on Chorus.
While the former was eventually released (and I think the sources can still be found in
the wild), I did not believe the latter was ever completed.