29 Sep
2017
29 Sep
'17
8:58 a.m.
What is your favorite UNIX. Three possible categories, choose one or more:
1) Free
2) Forced to use a commercial platform. I guess that could include
macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
3) Historical
Me:
1) FreeBSD - I find it to generally be the least annoying desktop and
laptop experience with admittedly careful selection of hardware to
ensure compatibility. It's ideal to me for commercial appliances and
servers due to the license, tight coupling of kernel and base, and
features like ZFS, jails, and pluggable TCP stacks. Linux distros
lost their luster for me once systemd was integrated into Debian, and
that kind of culture seems to be prevailing up and down the stack in a
way that I'd prefer to be an outside observer of Linux and not
dependent on it for now.
2) AIX - I often see people disparage AIX but I like it. I learned a
lot in my teens about C, build systems, compilers, and lots of
libraries trying to port random software to it for auto-didactic
reasons. It definitely doesn't feel like any other UNIX. It probably
supports high core count and NUMA better than any other system except
Linux, it had advanced virtualization with LPARs and containers with
WPARs before most and hot patchable kernel, fully pagable kernel, lots
of rigorous kernel engineering there that didn't get a lot of fanfare.
SMIT is kind of cool as a TUI and spits out commands that you can
learn through repetition and use at the CLI or scripting. I think it
probably peaked in the early 2000s, but the memory management, volume
management, and file systems all seemed pretty forward thinking up
until then. I don't think SMP performance was a strong suite until it
was pretty much a relegated niche though.
3) IRIX - it just screams '90s cool like an acrylic sweater. Soft
real time, immense graphics support, pro audio and video features,
lots of interesting commercial software, NUMA, supercomputers. I
enjoy tinkering on this still, but a lot of that is due to the neat
hardware.
Regards,
Kevin
29 Sep
29 Sep
9:28 a.m.
On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 07:58:59PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
What is your favorite UNIX. Three possible
categories, choose one or more:
1) Free
2) Forced to use a commercial platform. I guess that could include
macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
3) Historical
SunOS 4.1.3 Oh, man, how I wish that all of Unix today were based
on that. If you like FreeBSD you would love that kernel. It's BSD
for sure but then carefully moved forward into an excellent VM system,
a virtualized the file system with the vnode stuff, it cared about
the right picture. And all the bugs fixed.
I've worked in lots of other kernel source bases. They all sucked in
comparison. Including Solaris, fuck that shit, Bryan will yell at me
but Solaris sucked. Yeah, they made it useful with all the work they
did but it was never "home" and I think that even the people that worked
on it get that. Or not, it was never home for me.
SunOS had so much love and so much carefulness poured into it. And I
can't claim any credit, it was the people who came before me, Rusty, Rob,
Joe, Steve, those guys did the work that made me see the architecture
that they left for me to see.
Guy Harris worked on it, he left right around the time I joined, I think
he went to Auspex (sp?) but he would come back and pound on the door
to building 5 at around 6 or 7pm. Pope or I would go down and let him
in and he'd find a machine and look at the source and start screaming
about why haven't they fixed this bug? And he'd just fix it. He didn't
work here and he fixed bugs. I get it, it took me years after I left
Sun to stop saying "we" when we were talking about Sun.
The level of love, as measured by the amount of time we all spent to make
it better, was over the top. And it was because of the super stars who
showed us what an OS could be.
Today? Favorite? Grumble. It's sort of shitty. Linux is the obvious
winner but is it what I like? It's what I run. Have to give it credit.
It is pretty good. I'd prefer to be running a SunOS derived OS.
9:36 a.m.
I have the requisite hardware and media so I will give it a shake so I
can talk with you about it some time.
Auspex.. I have a story there believe it or not. Tore one apart at an
electronic junkyard I worked at part time in my teens. But I got it
booted up enough to test everything and sell as they wanted. The
hardware was very cool. I didn't know enough back then to evaluate
the software. I murdered a ton of interesting computers there sadly.
Still searching for salvation :D
Regards,
On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 8:28 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 07:58:59PM -0700, Kevin
Bowling wrote:
What is your favorite UNIX. Three possible
categories, choose one or more:
1) Free
2) Forced to use a commercial platform. I guess that could include
macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
3) Historical
SunOS 4.1.3 Oh, man, how I wish that all of Unix today were based
on that. If you like FreeBSD you would love that kernel. It's BSD
for sure but then carefully moved forward into an excellent VM system,
a virtualized the file system with the vnode stuff, it cared about
the right picture. And all the bugs fixed.
I've worked in lots of other kernel source bases. They all sucked in
comparison. Including Solaris, fuck that shit, Bryan will yell at me
but Solaris sucked. Yeah, they made it useful with all the work they
did but it was never "home" and I think that even the people that worked
on it get that. Or not, it was never home for me.
SunOS had so much love and so much carefulness poured into it. And I
can't claim any credit, it was the people who came before me, Rusty, Rob,
Joe, Steve, those guys did the work that made me see the architecture
that they left for me to see.
Guy Harris worked on it, he left right around the time I joined, I think
he went to Auspex (sp?) but he would come back and pound on the door
to building 5 at around 6 or 7pm. Pope or I would go down and let him
in and he'd find a machine and look at the source and start screaming
about why haven't they fixed this bug? And he'd just fix it. He didn't
work here and he fixed bugs. I get it, it took me years after I left
Sun to stop saying "we" when we were talking about Sun.
The level of love, as measured by the amount of time we all spent to make
it better, was over the top. And it was because of the super stars who
showed us what an OS could be.
Today? Favorite? Grumble. It's sort of shitty. Linux is the obvious
winner but is it what I like? It's what I run. Have to give it credit.
It is pretty good. I'd prefer to be running a SunOS derived OS. 
12:56 p.m.
'From: Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.com&gt;Sent: Fri, 29 Sep 2017
08:59:27I've worked in lots of other kernel source bases. They all
sucked incomparison. Including Solaris, fuck that shit, Bryan will yell at mebut
Solaris sucked. ...'As far as I remember Sunos-4 Kernel became
AT&T Sys5r4 kernel and made it into Sunos5 which became Solaris.
8:14 p.m.
As far as I remember Sunos-4 Kernel became AT&T
Sys5r4 kernel and
made it into Sunos5 which became Solaris.
Nope, Sun got SVR4 dumped on them and then we moved some of the stuff
from SunOS over. But a lot, most of it, got dropped. They are entirely
different kernels.
Don't get me wrong, there is some good stuff in Solaris, but I never
loved it. I loved the SunOS kernel.
6:08 p.m.
Isn't this a rehash of my recent thread? :)
On 9/28/2017 11:28 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
SunOS 4.1.3
Historically, yes. I was forced
kicking and screaming into Solaris back
in the 90's, because all the CAD/CAM software I administered moved to
Solaris, while Sun themselves moved to Solaris on their new SMP systems
like the SparcServer-1000 and even the 670 was more useful with Solaris.
Currently? Solaris - it's NEVER let me down in commercial or personal
use. Sure, I hit a bug or two here or there, maybe a controller that it
didn't like, but running PeopleSoft on it, Oracle database, whatever
else I specialize in, it's been great.
Like I said, I was forced kicking and screaming into Solaris - however,
once I got used to it, and having used SVR4.2 for a home BBS/USENET/UUCP
system modem front-end in the early 90's, I quickly grew to like it.
NUMA? Solaris does it very well, probably because of the huge SPARC
systems carrying over to the Intel world.
I used to run FreeBSD at home, for firewall, and general file server
usage. Why? Because I was in love with SunOS at the time ;)
30 Sep
30 Sep
9:40 p.m.
On Thu, 28 Sep 2017, Kevin Bowling wrote:
What is your favorite UNIX. Three possible
categories, choose one or more:
1) Free
2) Forced to use a commercial platform. I guess that could include
macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
3) Historical
Compared to many here, I'm barely a beginner, I'm in my 40s, got my
intorduction to Unix in the early 90s with SunOS 4.something while in
college.
1) Free:
I was then introduced to Linux by a friend of mine, back in the
pre-Slackware days even, some 0.9x kernel. The first kernel I compiled
myself was 0.96.
Like Larry said, Linux is mostly what I use as my desktop Linux. It
works well enough on my Thinkpad. I run NetBSD on my VPS for bl.org,
and I do prefer working in NetBSD, just that trying to get 'Desktop'
like work done on it is harder, as these days, it's all developed on
Linux and ported to others.
2) Commercial platform
In the 90s, it was SunOS 4, though I actually started to like working
in Solaris around 2.5.1. It started to stabilize and the jobs I was
working at started buying hardware that would run it well. (Solaris
2.4 on SS1 and SS2 was not fun). I've not had a lot of experience with
other commercial offerings. While I was with IBM, I was exposed to AIX
(of course), other jobs had HP/UX, and I even logged into an IRIX box
once, though that was in a DC across the country from me and was used as
a fileserver.
Since Oracle bought Sun, I've given up on Solaris, which really doesn't
leave many options for Commercial Unixy platforms. I do use an iMac at
home and a MacBook Pro for work, but even there, I spend most of my time
in xterms spawned form XQuartz logged into remote Linux systems.
3) Historical
I like playing with historical systems. I've recently started playing
with Amiga UNIX (Commodore's port of SysVr4 to 68030) under FS-UAE.
Maybe someday I'll get it running on the Amiga 3000 that is currently
gathering dust. I also have a Mac Quardra 950 out in the garage that
some day I want to get A/UX running on. Then there is the HP 9000
715/80 and the RISC NextSTEP media waiting for some round tuits. I've
recently found instructions for installing SunOS 4.1.3 under qemu-sparc
that I want to try as well.
--
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ
11:53 p.m.
On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
I've recently found instructions for installing
SunOS 4.1.3 under
qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
Can you share a pointer to those with us?
--
Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
Do obvious transformation on domain to reply privately _only_ on Usenet.
1 Oct
1 Oct
12:34 a.m.
On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
Sure:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4
Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :)
--
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ
I've recently found instructions for
installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
Can you share a pointer to those with us?
12:45 a.m.
Good stuff, I gotta try this. That Wiki reminded me that for the longest
time, I was running "xv" on Solaris only because of the compatibility
package for SunOS. I don't think I ever compiled it natively for Solaris.
On 9/30/2017 2:34 PM, Michael Parson wrote:
On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
Sure:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4
Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :)
I've recently found instructions for
installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
Can you share a pointer to those with us?
6:36 a.m.
On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 01:34:14PM -0500, Michael Parson wrote:
On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
If it runs 4.1.4 it will run 4.1.3 (which was my favorite release, lot
of Larry love in there, a lot of other people's love in there, lots of
late night hacking by people who cared).
On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
Sure:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4
Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :) I've recently found instructions for
installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
Can you share a pointer to those with us? 
6:51 a.m.
On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
If it runs 4.1.4 it will run 4.1.3 (which was my
favorite release, lot
of Larry love in there, a lot of other people's love in there, lots of
late night hacking by people who cared).
Agreed; it was my favourite SunOS. Never got to use 4.1.4, as $BOSS
decided to switch to Slowaris instead (that's where the applications
were).
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
7:10 a.m.
On Sun, Oct 01, 2017 at 11:51:30AM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
I think 4.1.4 had Greg Limes herculean effort to make the VM system
scale on multiprocessors. So it might be worth a look.
Yeah, at that time everyone was pushed to Solaris. Here's another Larry
story for ya.
I created this weird ass NFS server that was a cluster. I sort of
cheated but sort of did not. It ran really fast, it used one of the
first ethernet switches (a modified Kalpana, the mods were VLANs, I
thought I invented that but apparently somebody beat me to it). I did
the development on my beloved SunOS 4.x but Scooter insisted that it
ship with Solaris.
So I'm at the Moscone center, some tech/geek thing, I'm pitching this
product. It was a technical pitch, I'm an engineer, so it was mostly
geeks in the room.
There is some dude in the room who keeps railing on Solaris. I'm trying
to be a good soldier and say that Solaris is the future, yada yada.
This guy keeps going on and on about how much Solaris sucks and couldn't
he have this system with SunOS.
I finally lose it, like really lose it, and say "I know, I know, Solaris
sucks, you should see what this system does with SunOS, I fucking hate
Solaris".
It was all captured on tape. My boss, Ken Okin, VP of all server hardware
at Sun, said "Find that tape and destroy it". So I did.
Fun times? I guess? Welcome to the real world, it's not all about what
the geeks want. When it is, wallow in that, it doesn't happen that often.
--lm
If it runs 4.1.4 it will run 4.1.3 (which was my
favorite release, lot of
Larry love in there, a lot of other people's love in there, lots of late
night hacking by people who cared).
Agreed; it was my favourite SunOS. Never got to use 4.1.4, as $BOSS decided
to switch to Slowaris instead (that's where the applications were). 
7:13 a.m.
On Sat, Sep 30, 2017, at 18:10, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Sun, Oct 01, 2017 at 11:51:30AM +1100, Dave
Horsfall wrote:
I have source for 4.1.4 scurried away...but I don't think I have 4.1.3.
On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
I think 4.1.4 had Greg Limes herculean effort to make the VM system
scale on multiprocessors. So it might be worth a look.
If it runs 4.1.4 it will run 4.1.3 (which was my
favorite release, lot of
Larry love in there, a lot of other people's love in there, lots of late
night hacking by people who cared).
Agreed; it was my favourite SunOS. Never got to use 4.1.4, as $BOSS decided
to switch to Slowaris instead (that's where the applications were). Yeah, at that time everyone was pushed to Solaris.
Here's another Larry
story for ya.
I created this weird ass NFS server that was a cluster. I sort of
cheated but sort of did not. It ran really fast, it used one of the
first ethernet switches (a modified Kalpana, the mods were VLANs, I
thought I invented that but apparently somebody beat me to it). I did
the development on my beloved SunOS 4.x but Scooter insisted that it
ship with Solaris.
How'd you do VLANs on that?
So I'm at the Moscone center, some tech/geek thing, I'm pitching this
product. It was a technical pitch, I'm an engineer, so it was mostly
geeks in the room.
There is some dude in the room who keeps railing on Solaris. I'm trying
to be a good soldier and say that Solaris is the future, yada yada.
This guy keeps going on and on about how much Solaris sucks and couldn't
he have this system with SunOS.
I'd love to run SunOS on modern hardware...;)
I need to fix my IPX/IPC...
I finally lose it, like really lose it, and say "I know, I know, Solaris
sucks, you should see what this system does with SunOS, I fucking hate
Solaris".
It was all captured on tape. My boss, Ken Okin, VP of all server
hardware
at Sun, said "Find that tape and destroy it". So I did.
Fun times? I guess? Welcome to the real world, it's not all about what
the geeks want. When it is, wallow in that, it doesn't happen that
often.
--lm
--
Cory Smelosky
b4(a)gewt.net
9:43 a.m.
On 9/30/2017 9:10 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
I think 4.1.4 had Greg Limes herculean effort to make the VM system
scale on multiprocessors. So it might be worth a look.
This? From 4.1.4:
/* @(#)vm_mp.c 1.1 94/10/31 */
/*
* Copyright (c) 1986 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
*/
/*
* VM - multiprocessor/ing support.
*
* Currently the kmon_enter() / kmon_exit() pair implements a
* simple monitor for objects protected by the appropriate lock.
* The kcv_wait() / kcv_broadcast pait implements a simple
* condition variable which can be used for `sleeping'
* and `waking' inside a monitor if some resource is
* is needed which is not available.
*
* XXX - this code is written knowing about the semantics
* of sleep/wakeup and UNIX scheduling on a uniprocessor machine.
*/
8:07 p.m.
I finally lose it, like really lose it, and say
"I know, I know, Solaris
sucks, you should see what this system does with SunOS, I fucking hate
Solaris".
It was all captured on tape. My boss, Ken Okin, VP of all server hardware
at Sun, said "Find that tape and destroy it". So I did.
Fun times? I guess? Welcome to the real world, it's not all about what
the geeks want. When it is, wallow in that, it doesn't happen that often.
--lm
Solaris: so bad I left the company.
Hey does anybody remember what ever happened to Steve MacKay?
(I don’t mean what I did to him, because I remember that, just what happened to him
afterwards! ;-)
-Don
The Worst Job in the World
Subject: The Worst Job in the World
From: Michael Tiemann <tiemann(a)cygnus.com>
I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system
administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell.
Being a Unix system administrator is like being a tech in a biological warfare laboratory,
except that none of the substances are labeled consistently, any of the compounds are just
as likely to kill you by themselves as they are when mixed with one another, and it is
never clear what distinction is made between a catastrophic failure in the lab and a
successful test in the field.
But I don't want to tell you about biological warfare, I want to tell you about what
makes my friend's job so terrible. First, some context.
The training for Unix system administration is a frightening process. When machines start
dying, users start screaming, and everything grinds to a halt, the novice feels the cold
fingers of terror clutching about his heart.
#!/bin/sh
# this doesn't work, but no time to fix it -- hope nothing crashes
progname=$0
But if one stays the course, one might some day achieve the dubious satisfaction of being
able to mutter "at least I know why it broke!".
#!/bin/sh
# This works...I wonder if it will get me laid
progname="`echo $0 | sed 's:^\./\./:\./:'`"
But there are many who must dwell in this miasma both day and night. What makes my
friend's job so ugly is that he doesn't only work with just any strain of Unix
-- he works with Solaris. And he doesn't just deal with just any braindead users --
his users are the executives at Sun Microsystems.
Let me tell you about Sun Microsystems. At Sun, there's a long history of executives
playing pranks on one another. For April Fools, these rowdies would play tricks like
putting a golf course (complete with putting green) in Scott McNealy's office, or
floating Bill Joy's Ferrari in one of the landscaped ponds. Things have come a long
way since then. Now every day is April Fools, and my friend doesn't like it one bit.
VP: "Admin!! What the fuck is this thing running on my machine?"
Admin: "It's Solaris, sir."
VP: "Get it off of my machine at once!"
Admin: "But sir, Ed Zander told me that you should be running Solaris now."
VP: "Zander, huh? I'll fix him. Is he running Solaris?"
Admin: "No sir."
VP: "Why not?"
Admin: "If he ran Solaris, he wouldn't be able to get any work done."
VP: "Very well, restore my machine to SunOS, and put this Solaris crap on
Zander's machine."
Admin: "But sir..."
VP: "That's an order! And tell him Scott gave you the directive himself!"
Admin: "Yes, sir."
Zander: "Admin!! What the fuck is this thing running on my machine?"
Admin: "It's Solaris, sir."
Zander: "Get it off of my machine at once!"
Admin: "But sir, Scott McNealy told me that you should be running Solaris now."
Zander: "McNealy, huh? I'll fix him. Is he running Solaris?"
...
The only thing worse that being a Unix system administrator is doing the job for
ungrateful users.
9:05 a.m.
On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Michael Parson wrote:
On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
Found some more info about qemu-system-sparc, turns out, you don't even
need an 'ss5.bin' file, and CG3 graphics seem to work. Aparently the
built-in stuff works well enough to boot and install the OS.
I'm using a real SS5 rom image and -vga cg3 to have a graphical head.
Now to see if I can find any pre-compiled software archives anywhere.
I tried NextStep too. The media boots, but it eventually hangs and
never lets me install.
--
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ
On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
Sure:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4
Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :) I've recently found instructions for
installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
Can you share a pointer to those with us?
9:15 a.m.
This one is kind of wild, it emulates a SparcStation 5 on an FPGA
http://temlib.org. The screenshots show SunOS 4.1.4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYL42WQfgGI
On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 8:05 PM, Michael Parson <mparson(a)bl.org> wrote:
On Sat, 30 Sep 2017, Michael Parson wrote:
On 2017-09-30 12:53, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
Found some more info about qemu-system-sparc, turns out, you don't even
need an 'ss5.bin' file, and CG3 graphics seem to work. Aparently the
built-in stuff works well enough to boot and install the OS.
I'm using a real SS5 rom image and -vga cg3 to have a graphical head.
Now to see if I can find any pre-compiled software archives anywhere.
I tried NextStep too. The media boots, but it eventually hangs and
never lets me install.
--
Michael Parson
Pflugerville, TX
KF5LGQ
On 2017-09-30 10:40, Michael Parson wrote:
Sure:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/SunOS_4.1.4
Oops, 4.1.4, not .3. :) I've recently found instructions for
installing SunOS 4.1.3 under
qemu-sparc that I want to try as well.
Can you share a pointer to those with us? 
9:27 p.m.
On Sep 28, 2017 11:02 PM, "Kevin Bowling" <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com>
wrote:
What is your favorite UNIX. Three possible categories, choose one or more:
1) Free
2) Forced to use a commercial platform. I guess that could include
macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
3) Historical
1. FreeBSD is best of breed, these days. It's logical, stuff tends to just
work, and it just feels right.
2. I don't have much experience with modern commercial Unix. A few of my
friends really like macOS (formerly OS X, nee NeXTSTEP), but it's
artificially locked to Apple hardware so I've never really tried it.
Frankly, I do most of my daily computing on Windows, which works fine for
video games, word processing, web browsing, graphics work, and hosting VMs
to run FreeBSD in.
3. NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP is still really cool. The kernel is a mess and the
whole PostScript as primary display was less than ideal for graphics
performance, but it was cool and nobody's done a graphical UI as well since.
Mike
10:37 p.m.
On 09/28/2017 10:58 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
What is your favorite UNIX. Three possible
categories, choose one or more:
1) Free
2) Forced to use a commercial platform. I guess that could include
macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
3) Historical
1) Linux - not the greatest, by far, but it gets the job done and
pays
the bills ( in my case, anyway ). And it still has good long term
viability, as of 2017, anyway.
2) Solaris - Sun finally got it right starting with Solaris 7, and it
just got better from there. I ran it for many, many years on my Home
Ultra 5.
Really sad to see what Oracle did to it! I use to have boss say that
Solaris was the UNIX geek's UNIX, he might be right ( altho these days
that's probably BSD ).
3) Irix - Not the best UNIX, but damn, those workstations it ran on WERE
the best. I miss my Indigo R4K/Elan almost as much as I do my Ultra 5
with Solaris 9 on it!
--
-- Derrik
Derrik Walker v2.0, RHCE
dwalker(a)doomd.net
"Those UNIX guys, they think weird!" -- John C. Dvorak
10:51 p.m.
My favourite remains V7 on a pdp11. Not because of any specious
reductionism, but because it was a dawning experience, and because of
the 'learn' package which I found very good, subsequently stripped
because of licence restrictions. I had the care of one in Leeds uni in
'82 and loved it. Far more than the Norsk Data mini, perhaps less
usefully than the 780s with 4.1 but still. It was a joy.
I freely admit I did next to nothing of substance (maintenance coding
an X.25 comms package for JANET was the high spot, on a compiler with
a very low #define expansion limit which hit us badly) but somehow, it
remains my favourite.
I also admired the ease with which people I knew could do things with
it. 32V was (AFAIK) a logical outcome.
On Sun, Oct 1, 2017 at 9:37 AM, Derrik Walker v2.0 <dwalker(a)doomd.net> wrote:
On 09/28/2017 10:58 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
What is your favorite UNIX. Three possible categories, choose one or
more:
1) Free
2) Forced to use a commercial platform. I guess that could include
macOS and z/OS with some vivid imagination, maybe even NT.
3) Historical
1) Linux - not the greatest, by far, but it gets the job done and pays the
bills ( in my case, anyway ). And it still has good long term viability, as
of 2017, anyway.
2) Solaris - Sun finally got it right starting with Solaris 7, and it just
got better from there. I ran it for many, many years on my Home Ultra 5.
Really sad to see what Oracle did to it! I use to have boss say that Solaris
was the UNIX geek's UNIX, he might be right ( altho these days that's
probably BSD ).
3) Irix - Not the best UNIX, but damn, those workstations it ran on WERE the
best. I miss my Indigo R4K/Elan almost as much as I do my Ultra 5 with
Solaris 9 on it!
--
-- Derrik
Derrik Walker v2.0, RHCE
dwalker(a)doomd.net
"Those UNIX guys, they think weird!" -- John C. Dvorak
2638
days inactive
2640
days old
20 comments
12 participants
participants (12)
-
Arthur Krewat -
Cory Smelosky -
Dave Horsfall -
Derrik Walker v2.0 -
Don Hopkins -
George Michaelson -
Ian Zimmerman -
Kevin Bowling -
Larry McVoy -
Michael Kerpan -
Michael Parson -
Mutiny