29 Aug
2019
29 Aug
'19
1:09 a.m.
This was pre-SLS as well. I remember vividly how excited I was when it
came out in mid-92 and how much like cheating it was. A little googling
and I'm sure I used the HJ Lu diskettes. I don't actually remember
hand-editing the MBR but, well, I probably did.
Adam
On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 4:01 PM William Pechter <pechter(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 8/28/2019 6:48 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
It probably was the partition/slice confusion that, well, confused me,
then. My experience, such as it was, was from the DOS world.
As was mine mostly 8-) I remember it from the PITA it was to translate in
my head. Unix folks looked at partitions as /dev/dsk/0s0->0s7 (I think 7
was the SVR2 maximum. The "Unix" partitions fit inside the FDISK partition
or dos slice... The dos guys looked at it kind of like the fdisk space
disk0 partition 3 (for example) was the partition and then the BSD folks
broke that in to /dev/sd0a /dev/sd0b /dev/sd0c etc.
I did a little SunOS and SysV along with Dos and Windows and could make
them coexist as long as there was an open primary dos partition.
Although the period I am thinking of was way pre-slackware. You had a
boot floppy and a root floppy and that was about it, I think. I think the
kernel had MFM/RLL disk drivers for an ISA bus interface? I remember that
I could boot the thing on the MCA machines in the lab but not actually
install it (even had I been allowed to), and I think installation was
pretty much fdisk/mkfs, extract the tarball...I don't remember how you
installed the bootloader...which I guess was already LILO at that point?
Probably just dding the bootsector to the first physical sector of the
disk? Version 0.08 or so, maybe?
Sounds like SLS -- Soft Landing System -- which later was pretty much
replaced with Slackware. I used the early MCA stuff on PS/2's at IBM for a
while. Most of the PS/2 stuff we had was SCSI. The boot loader was lilo.
It could go in the partition space or disk mbr. See:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-bootload/index.html
It was quite a while ago, and I was drunk for most of college,
so....memory is imprecise at best.
On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 3:28 PM Clem cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Not true 386BSD used fdisk. It shared the disk
just fine. In fact I
liked the way it sliced the disk much better than Slackware in those days.
Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
quite.
On Aug 28, 2019, at 4:27 PM, Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I was an ardent OS/2 supporter for a long time. Sure, IBM's anemic
marketing, and their close-to-outright-hostility to 3rd-party developers
didn't help. But what killed it, really, was how damn good its 16-bit
support was. It *was* a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than
3.11fW. So no one wrote to the relatively tiny market of 32-bit OS/2.
I fear that had Linux not made the leap, MS might well have won. It's
largely the AOL-fuelled explosion of popularity of the Internet and Windows
ignoring same until too late that opened the door enough for Linux to jam
its foot in.
Hurd was, by the time of the '386 Unix Wars and early Linux, clearly not
going to be a contender, I guess because it was about cool research
features rather than running user-facing code. I kept waiting for a usable
kernel to go with what Linux had already shown was a quite decent
userspace, but eventually had better things to do with my life (like chase
BeOS). It was like waiting for Perl 6--it missed its moment.
Plan 9 and Amoeba were both really nifty. I never used Sprite.
Neither one of them had much of a chance in the real world. Much like Unix
itself, Linux's worse-is-better approach really worked.
I have a hypothesis about Linux's ascendance too, which is a personal
anecdote I am inflating to the status of hypothesis. As I recall, the
*BSDs for 386 all assumed they owned the hard disk. Like, the whole
thing. You couldn't, at least in 1992, create a multiboot system--or at
least it was my strong impression you could not. I was an undergrad. I
had one '386 at my disposal, with one hard disk, and, hey, I needed DOS and
Windows to write my papers (I don't know about you, but I wanted to write
in my room, where I could have my references at hand and be reasonably
undisturbed; sure Framemaker was a much better setup than Word For Windows
1.2 but having to use it in the computer lab made it a nonstarter for me).
Papers, and, well, to play games. Sure, that too.
Linux let me defragment my drive, non-destructively repartition it, and
create a dual-boot system, so that I could both use the computer for school
and screw around on Linux. I'm probably not the only person for whom this
was a decisive factor.
Adam
On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 1:08 PM Christopher Browne <cbbrowne(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Mon, 26 Aug 2019 at 19:14, Arthur Krewat
<krewat(a)kilonet.net> wrote:
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/26/0051234/celebrating-the-28th-anni…
Leaving licensing and copyright issues out of this mental exercise,
what
would we have now if it wasn't for Linux? Not what you'd WANT it to be,
although that can add to the discussion, but what WOULD it be?
I'm not asking as a proponent of Linux. If anything, I was dragged
kicking and screaming into the current day and have begrudgingly ceded
my server space to Linux.
But if not for Linux, would it be BSD? A System V variant? Or (the
horror) Windows NT?
I can make a firm "dunno" sound :-)
Some facts can come together to point away from a number of
possibilities...
- If you look at the number of hobbyist "Unix homages" that emerged at
around that time, it's clear that there was a sizable community of
interested folk willing to build their own thing, and that weren't
interested in Windows NT. (Nay, one should put that more strongly... That
had their minds set on something NOT from Microsoft.) So I think we can
cross Windows NT off the list.
- OS/2 should briefly come on the list. It was likable in many ways, if
only IBM had actually supported it... But it suffers from something of the
same problem as Windows NT; there were a lot of folk that were only
slightly less despising of IBM at the time than of Microsoft.
- Hurd was imagined to be the next thing...
To borrow from my cookie file...
"Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from
now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M
SPARCstation-5." -- Andrew Tanenbaum, 1992.
%
"You'll be rid of most of us when BSD-detox or GNU comes out, which
should happen in the next few months (yeah, right)." -- Richard Tobin,
1992. [BSD did follow within a year]
%
"I am aware of the benefits of a micro kernel approach. However, the
fact remains that Linux is here, and GNU isn't --- and people have
been working on Hurd for a lot longer than Linus has been working on
Linux." -- Ted T'so, 1992.
Ted has been on this thread, and should be amused (and slightly
disturbed!) that his old statements are being held here and there, ready to
trot out :-).
In the absence of Linux, perhaps hackers would have flocked to Hurd, but
there was enough going on that there was plenty of room for them to have
done so anyways.
I'm not sure what to blame on whatever happened post-1992, though I'd
put some on Microsoft Research having taken the wind out of Mach's sails by
hiring off a bunch of the relevant folk. In order for Hurd to "make it,"
Mach has to "make it," too, and it looked like they were depending on CMU
to be behind that. (I'm not sure I'm right about that; happy to hear a
better story.)
Anyway, Hurd *might* have been a "next thing," and I don't think the
popularity of Linux was enough to have completely taken wind out of its
sails, given that there's the dozens of "Unix homages" out there.
- I'd like to imagine Plan 9 being an alternative, but it was "properly
commercial" for a goodly long time (hence not amenable to attaching waves
of hackers to it to add their favorite device drivers), and was never taken
as a serious answer. Many of us had admired it from afar via the Dr Dobbs
Journal issue (when was that? mid or late '90s?) but only from afar.
- FreeBSD is the single best answer I can throw up as a possibility, as
it was the one actively targeting 80386 hardware. And that had the big
risk of the AT&T lawsuit lurking over it, so had that gone in a different
direction, then that is a branch sadly easily trimmed.
If we lop both Linux and FreeBSD off the list of possibilities, I don't
imagine Windows NT or OS/2 bubble to the top, instead, a critical mass
would have stood behind ... something else, I'd think. I don't know which
to suggest.
--
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"