12 Oct
2017
12 Oct
'17
1:04 p.m.
Hi,
I came across this on Lobsters[1] today and thought it may be of interest
to the list:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html
It appears to be an internal SGI memo that's rather critical of IRIX 5.1.
Does anyone know if it's true?
[1] https://lobste.rs/
Cheers, MJ
--
Michael-John Turner * mj(a)mjturner.net * http://mjturner.net/
12 Oct
12 Oct
2 p.m.
I strongly suspect it was true, Tom Davis was an SGI employee as
were the other people mentioned.
On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 02:04:43PM +0100, Michael-John Turner wrote:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
2:16 p.m.
The version of the embarrassing memo on the University of Virginia CS415 reading list that
I linked to is an email response from the author Tom Davis, posted to
comp.sys.next.advocacy on 25 Apr 1994, which includes his extremely interesting inline
comments that he added after the memo was leaked, following up about what happened at SGI
in response to the leak!
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/irix-bloat.txt
<http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/irix-bloat.txt>
SGI the institution was embarrassed, but I don’t think Tom Davis has anything to be
embarrassed about personally: he handled it well and honestly, told the unvarnished truth
to management, which had a positive effect, and his candid write-up and response now
serves as a great example for students learning how things work in the real world!
It should be required reading in all computer science programs (and management programs
too)!
-Don
2:55 p.m.
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/irix-bloat.txt
<https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~cs415/reading/irix-bloat.txt>
One of the main advantages of NeWS was
that all the apps shared the same user interface code.
SGI went down that road a little bit but not far enough with 4Sight, their own merged X11
+ NeWS + GL window system they did before Sun developed OpenWindows X11/NeWS.
The 4Sight window frames and desktop pop-up menu were implemented in NeWS by PostScript
code running in the server, and the menus used a NeWS overlay canvas to draw the menus in
a hardware overlay plane, so it didn’t have to repaint the graphics underneath when the
menu popped down.
But SGI’s desktop apps and clients themselves didn’t use a NeWS user interface toolkit
(except for NeMACS of course), and they eventually gave up on NeWS because Sun wasn’t
being very helpful or supportive, and went down the path of Bloatif instead.
Shared libraries weren’t universally supported, and even when they were, the ecosystem
hadn’t completely converted yet.
The SunView libraries were so big, that in the absence of shared libraries, Sun would
compile all the common SunView desktop applications into one giant happy executable
“tooltool", to simulate monolithic shared libraries just between those apps. The
names of all the different tools were hard linked together to the same giant universal
desktop mega-app clusterfuck, which would run a different main loop depending the name it
was invoked with.
-Don
3:09 p.m.
Yeah, I remember that being a SunOS 3.x limitation. 4.x was a whole lot nicer!
Wikipedia says:
SunOS 4.0: Dec 1988: New virtual memory system, dynamic linking, automounter, System V
STREAMS I/O. Sun386i support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS#History
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS#History>
Then it all went downhill from there… ;(
-Don
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/sunos-died.html
<http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/sunos-died.html>
The Day SunOS Died
Lyrics by N. R. "Norm" Lunde.
Apologies to Don McLean.
Remember when those guys out West
With their longish hair and paisley vests
Were starting up, straight out of UCB?
They used those Motorola chips
Which at the time were really hip
And looked upon the world through VME.
Their first attempt ran like a pig
But it was the start of something big;
They called the next one the Sun-2
And though they only sold a few
It soon gave birth unto the new
Sun-3 which was their pride
And now they're singing
[chorus]
"Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
ATT System V has replaced BSD.
You can cling to the standards of the industry
But only if you pay the right fee --
Only if you pay the right fee . . ."
The hardware wasn't all they sold.
Their Berkeley port was solid gold
And interfaced with System V, no less!
They implemented all the stuff
That Berkeley thought would be enough
Then added RPC and NFS.
It was a lot of code to cram
Into just four megs of RAM.
The later revs were really cool
With added values like SunTools
But then they took us all for fools
By peddling Solaris . . .
And they were singing,
[chorus]
They took a RISC and kindled SPARC.
The difference was like light and dark.
The Sun-4s were the fastest and the best.
The user base was having fun
Installing SunOS 4.1
But what was coming no one could have guessed.
The installed base was sound
And software did abound.
While all the hackers laughed and played
Already plans were being made
To make the dubious "upgrade"
To Sun's new Solaris . . .
And Sun was singing,
[chorus]
The cartridge tapes were first to go --
The CD-ROM's a must, you know
And floppy drives will soon go out the door.
I tried to call and ask them why
But they took away my TTY
And left my modem lying on the floor.
While they were on a roll
They moved the damned Control.
The Ethernet's now twisted pair
Which no one uses anywhere.
ISDN is still more rare --
The bandwidth's even less!
But still they're singing
[chorus]
But worst of all is what they've done
To software that we used to run
Like dbx and even /bin/cc.
Compilers now have license locks
Wrapped up in OpenWindows crocks --
We even have to pay for GCC!
The applications broke;
/usr/local went up in smoke.
The features we've depended on
Before too long will all be gone
But Sun, I'm sure, will carry on
By peddling Solaris,
Forever singing,
[chorus]
3:20 p.m.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS#History
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS#History>
The SunOS 3.x => 4.x transition was also the BSD 4.2 => 4.3 transition.
Sun operating system version numbers seemed to parallel the version of Unix it was based
on for a while there, until it started spinning out of control and got sucked up into the
System V death star.
Sun UNIX 0.7: UniSoftUNIX v7
SunOS 1.x: 4.1 BSD
SunOS 2.x: 4.2 BSD
SunOS 3.x: 4.2 BSD + some 4.3 BSD and some System V
SunOS 4.x: 4.3 BSD + even more System V
SunOS 5.0: SVR4
-Don
2:22 p.m.
New subject: AT&T taking over Sun: Panic!
Here’s an old interactive joke about how the costly AT&T System V way of doing things
was taking a toll on the free old BSD ways of Unix at Sun.
It was better when the <BLINK> tag used to work. But now you can just click on the
non-blinking cursor.
-Don
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/panic.html
<http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/panic.html>
13 Oct
13 Oct
3:59 p.m.
Talking out of memory, but I still remember hacking the system to make
it work.
We had bought two SGI systems, a large one (a Power Challenge) with
16 CPUs and 768MB and an Indy with 16MB. Each had its own version
of the system. We also had several Indigos to which I had access.
The Indy wouldn't boot correctly or fail miserably very soon after
booting after I had installed a number of FLOSS software packages
on it. I don't remember what triggered the problem, some kind of
interaction with the hardware. So I took to the header files and
assembler code that came with the system, deduced what each parameter
meant and, from that what the original code should have looked like to
explain the behaviour, then compared with the (meager) code for the
other systems, and came up with a patch that would ensure that the
system would boot and run without crashing.
So, yes, as shipped 5.1 was unusable on an Indy. I have looked to see
if I still keep the patches around, but it was so long ago that I can't
find anything from the date (and besides, I've switched through many
other systems since).
j
It allowed me to work fairly well until 5.3.
On Thu, 12 Oct 2017 07:00:21 -0700
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
--
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8 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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Don Hopkins -
Jose R. Valverde -
Larry McVoy -
Michael-John Turner