17 Jun
2022
17 Jun
'22
6:10 a.m.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 09:44:02AM +1000, George Michaelson wrote:
v7 exploded into the world, and made BSD and SunOS
happen.
v8 and 9 and 10 had to work harder to get mindshare because something
was already there.
I think this is spot on. v7 was pretty easy to find in src form, I know
I've seen some of v{8,9,10} in Shannon's treasure trove of Unix source
at Sun but they were less common.
things like rc were too "confrontational" to
a mind attuned to bourne
shell. Sockets (which btw, totally SUCK PUS) were coded into things
and even (YECHH) made POSIX and IETF spec status. Streams didn't stand
a chance.
There was streams (from Dennis) and STREAMS from Sys whatever. I don't
know how great streams was, I read the paper and it seemed fine for a tty
driver, networking I dunno. And having seen an SGI SMP machine brought
to it's knees by racks and racks of modems, I'm not sure streams is even
a good idea for ttys; it's fine for a personal system, I've never seen
that sort of layered design perform well at scale. I have seen what a
networking stack in STREAMS did, it was awful, absolutely awful.
Sun bought the STREAMS networking stack from Lachman, same one that
I ported to the ETA 10 and SCO Unix, it sucked hard. Sun threw it out,
hired Mentat to give them a performant STREAMS stack, I'm not sure
that ever worked. I know they put back the socket interface, as much
as people don't like it, it's a non-starter to have an OS without it.