Re: [TUHS] A/UX [was Linux is on-topic]

My spouse (Vicki Brown) worked in the initial A/UX group and I contracted for it (reviewing the man pages). Here are a few historical tidbits... A number of A/UX boxes were purchased and immediately reloaded with Mac OS (because only the A/UX boxes were available with 80 MB disk drives). A/UX had an "Eschatology" feature whose purpose was to bring a damaged operting system back to a known working state. It was based on a text file of metadata and a small set of replacement files (e.g., commands). The A/UX installation kit was delivered on several dozen floppy disks. In order to minimize the number of disks, Vicki implemented a bin packing algorithm. It grabbed promising sets of files, compressed them, and checked the resulting size. One challenge in building the kit was creating a boot floppy. To make this possible, Vicki created a precursor to busybox: a single program which ran under various names, providing subsets of common commands' functionalities. Because this shared the libraries, it saved lots of space... -r