SunOS wasn't multi threaded. Linux seems to have done that pretty well without getting all bloated (unlike early Solaris releases, I can't speak to the later ones). Linux is just more mature, has had more people working on it (which is both a good and a bad thing). And didn't have Sun's stick in the mud approach to compat that made things like /proc in Solaris way way way less useful than Linux' /proc. So it's really hard to say. On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 11:51:47AM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote: -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

Everything. I'm trying to grok how long Linux as a whole was in active development. That includes all the GNU utilities, GCC, everything. Just like a "regular" corporate development environment would have devoted to the cause :) On 3/14/2017 11:57 AM, Michael Kjörling wrote:

On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 2:06 PM, Jason Stevens < jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com&gt; wrote: ​It ran on the 68000 before the *20. rms had access to Masscomp box we gave him fairly early on.​ I remember pitching to our exec's trying to get him more HW and trying explain who he was to them at the time. That would have been late 85. He may have had access to that system before he got a Sun but I don't remember. That said, I'm sure the MC-500 was not the first 68000 he had access. I think he was using HW in Steve Ward's lab that the Trix guys were developing with TI and he might have had access to an Apollo system. If we can find Jack test he might remember, Noel do you remember how that went down?

That's not really fair. The compiler and the utilities was developed for UNIX long before the Linux kernel existed. This is why so many of consider "Linux" just the current version of UNIX. On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 12:20 PM, Arthur Krewat &lt;krewat(a)kilonet.net&gt; wrote:

On 14 Mar 2017 15:48 -0400, from krewat(a)kilonet.net (Arthur Krewat): Then why limit yourself to the C compiler? The operating system probably relies on an early bootstrapper layer to start (on the IBM PC and similar systems this is the BIOS or more recently UEFI; other architectures are similar or different). The code was probably written using keyboards, which may or may not rely on firmware for the physical key to key code to operating system input mapping, let alone the editor and file system code used to store those first few chunks of code. And what about the timelines of _those_? At some point the system becomes self-hosting in the software sense, but it took work to get to that point. And so on. I think you see where I am heading with this; if we're going to include things that were not done specifically for the operating system in question, then unless we draw a clear line somewhere, we end up with some guy working on vacuum tube theory a century ago and _still_ aren't anywhere near an answer to "how long is the timeline of this piece of software?". Hence, absent some kind of demarcation, that discussion becomes meaningless. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)

On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 11:36:21AM -0400, Arthur Krewat wrote: Yeah, SunOS 4.1.4 had some MP work done to it. Pretty sure I posted about it here and dragged Greg Limes into it. He was involved in that work. I think it sort of worked up to 4 CPUs but as with all early kernel threading stuff it worked better when it was a 4 cpus of userland work, less so when it was 4 cpus of I/O. You and me both.

On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 11:43:34AM -0600, Warner Losh wrote: I don't suppose that code is around anywhere? I'd love to see what they did. Even as a set of diffs from 4.1 would be cool.

Let's not forget X11 which has a long history as well starting in 1984. The 11th version of the protocol (X11) dates from 1987. All the X11 versions are online still due to the X consortium. However, X10 and earlier can be hard to find. https://www.x.org/releases/ has X10R3 and X10R4, but nothing earlier. That's also a huge part of Linux since it represents its windowing system. I used X10 on a sun 3/50 back in the day before they upgraded it to X11. It was slower and buggier than SunTools, but more cutting edge. suntools is dead and X11 is still alive. suntools went directly to the frame buffer, while X always did the protocol thing (though with many attempts over the years to make the protocol layer optional, maybe wayland will finally succeed)... Many of the gnu tools started life as BSD code that was hacked on and rebranded with the GPL. Most of that original code is now gone, but in the early days it was the source of much friction between the BSD and GPL communities, even if a lot (all) of the code was eventually replaced... It wasn't so much the use of the code that bothered people, but the filing off of the original attributions... All that's water under the bridge, but the fact that this happened, as well as many other incidents in the early days, goes a long way to explain many of the hard feelings and out-sized reactions you used to see back in the day.... This is also an important motivating factor for the foundation that Linux was built on: This friction, the causes of which were partially real or and partially imagined, drive much innovation in both camps... Warner On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 10:20 AM, Arthur Krewat &lt;krewat(a)kilonet.net&gt; wrote:

Have a look at the following: GNU's Bulletin, vol. 1 no. 6, January, 1989 Contents of Beta Test Tape https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull6.html#SEC17 GNU's Bulletin, vol. 1 no. 7, June, 1989 https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull7.html "A collection of utilities for file manipulation, including ls, mv, cp, cat, rm, du, head, tail and cmp will be released soon." ... "The GNU project is working to provide reimplementations of System V features that Berkeley Unix lacks, such as improved shells and make commands." GNU's Bulletin, vol. 1 no. 9, June 1990 https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull9.html#SEC10 GNU Project Status Report "We have added a collection of utilities for file manipulation to the Pre-Release tape. The collection includes ls, mv, cp, cat, rm, du, head, tail, cmp, chmod, mkdir, and ln." So around same time GNU project didn't publish some the most common tools, but soon did. I didn't check, but I am pretty sure these are all different code than the rewritten BSD code. Duplicated work.

If you read the early GNUs Bulletins you find a quite positive attitude towards the BSD community. Wesley Parish Quoting arnold(a)skeeve.com: "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor, Method for Guitar "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

I could never convince the principals to call the FreeBSD project "Radio Free Berkeley." As for duplication of effort, I'm not sure anybody cared. Certainly RMS didn't give a rats ass. I suspect some of the stuff came from sources outside of both projects, like stuff we did at BRL (although, those using that tape need to be careful, most of that stuff came right out of the system V sources, hacked over to work on BSD).

On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 6:45 PM, Josh Good &lt;pepe(a)naleco.com&gt; wrote: ​Arghhh ​.. sorry you pushed a "Clem Hot Button" -- Traditional AT&T UNIX was always "Open Source" but it was licensed for $s however and you could see it unless you paid to get a ticket from AT&T. But if you did, it was very open and if fact that is why Unix flourished. I admit, I have found it fascinating to hear from many of you that you did not believe it was so easy to get access to the sources in those days, but the truth is - it was open and because it was open, an industry was born around UNIX. Not the real "closed" systems of the day. That said... the original code was never "Free and Open Source" - although some believe it was made so (such as the UCB lawyers described here and I'll not re-debate). Others on this list, such as Larry, strongly believe that IP was ripped off and have argued that. The argument about BSDi/386BSD/ et al is based is the "Free" part, not the "Open" part. As I have pointed out, I switched from 386BSD to Linux because I was worried we were going to lose access to "free" UNIX. This is very much the same as what happened by many other hackers in the day. And as Larry points out, when people like Larry, me et al started hacking, Linux improved. But the improvement happened *because of the economics of the system*. The other issue is that economics of UNIX changed. When UNIX was originally developed, for a University, the cost the systems was say 50-100K and the cost of Unix was at most $100. For a firm it was $20K for the first system and 5K for each system there after. Expensive, but manageable. As for the cost of entry in a Unix system dropped to a $5-$10K for the HW and SW together, the AT&T went up to $100K for the first system and $20K for the second, although if got a redistribution license it could drop to about $1K per system (BTW - that was the big fight with MSFT during the time of the negotiation for what would become the System III license - Gates wanted to pay $25 per CPU for Xenix and we laughed at by AT&T, DEC, HP, IBM et al - I was in the room during that discussion in fact). My point is that you (and many others) equate "open" and "free" - I ask you to please not make that error. Open means we can talk about it and share it, see it. Which is exactly what we did "back in the day". But as people pointed out you had to pay AT&T to be a member of the UNIX club if you were commercial, although any University type could be apart for free. Note the university restrictions were imposed by them (for probably good reasons), but none the less - the code was open and >>was<< made available at many places. But it was not "free." Linus chose to make make Linux free, bless him. This single act, changed the economic potential of his "product" and in the end, is what allowed it to expand. But as I said, earlier today, this is right out Prof. Clay Christensen's disruptive technology theory <https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Management-Innovation/dp/1633691780/ref=dp_ob_title_bk> . Rant over.... Clem

On 2017 Mar 14, 21:11, Clem Cole wrote: What UNIX for PC in the '90s had the option to buy a source code license for that specific version, so that PC hackers could write drivers for their hardware and tune the kernel internals to their liking, or be able to fix themselves a bug in the serial port driver, etc.? Certainly not OpenServer, not UnixWare nor SCO Xenix. Did DELL Unix offered a payware source code license for their product? I'm not aware of such. is, the version running on your hardware and the version with the drivers you are using (unless you were an employee at IBM, DEC, HP or SUN running propietary hardware and happened to be in the right group). It is obvious to me that RMS's GNU movement was aimed at solving that very problem. And if that was a problem, then the "UNIX openness" you talk about does not seem to have been very practical at all. At least, it was totally useless to PC hackers, like Linus Torvalds - he had to write his own UNIX, because he was not able to get any UNIX source code he could readily compile and run on his i386. -- Josh Good

We had the source code from Interactive Systems for their 386 implementations of IS/1 (pretty bare bones SysV) Back around 1988. I had it running on the PC and also was porting it to an Multibus II system (message passing coprocessor). Anyhow you didn’t need the source to rebuild the kernels and write device drivers. The necessary header file were there along with the .o files needed to link your new stuff to the kernel.

Sorry -- finger fumble... SVR4 (aka UnixWare) was available for source - the problem is many people did like the price to see it. It was $100K. But the source was available it was open and many, many of people with PC and had access to it, wrote drivers for it etc. There were books published about it. It was hardly secret. That said, BSDi was $1K until the law suite and the pretty reasonable at the time, and NET2 would eventually become free in the same way as Linux - purely a copying fee. Linus has gone on record if he had know about the 386BSD download, he would have used it. It was a case of not knowing. But as Larry points out, some people still are not happy with the results. It's also not clear that people like me would still not gotten scared when the court case came -- which clouded things... I'm not sating Linux was (and is not) important. Just saying please don't say UNIX was not Open. It was. Unix was not Free. On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 3:28 PM, Josh Good &lt;pepe(a)naleco.com&gt; wrote:

My point is that is was on the *price list, *the sources were never hidden away. And that a lot of people did have access to it. Your point - the prices to get a ticket was too high and thus, when the price was even less, even more had access. Which I did not (and do not) disagree. But Unix was open, people did discussed it, people did look at it, learned from it etc.... that was not true of "closed systems" like say Cisco's. Our even VMS, although VM, TSS, OS/360 and the like were "Open." That's why we have a UNIX "industry" -- it spread beyond the "ivy league" as you said it. The ideas leaked out, because AT&T made it open - because they had by the 1956 consent decree et al.... That is a clear distinction. And please its not about a wall garden ... because it really was not that hard. I'm not disagreeing that it did not happen and your point is that people were excluded ... I get that. But don't call Unix closed because there was a price (aka a ticket). It just was not "free" -- that's all I'm saying and as you have pointed out that difference was in practice to many, many people large (which I'm not disagreeing). You and I really need to have the beer together ;-) On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 4:27 PM, Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.com&gt; wrote:

Arthur's behavior, I think really proves my point.... you were able to do that because UNIX was (is) open and was being studies and used by a lot of people had folks did have access to the source. You did not see VMS, NT or the like having academic books written about them, and used as models in OS classes. You would not have been able to do that with NT or VMS. And whole point is that when AT&T did try to pull it back as a trade secret, they failed. The courts said -- no. This is open.... this has been published - this story has been told. These ideas out "out there." That is why if AT&T had >>won<< the BSDi/UCB case, technical Linux and all the clone were in violation also. It it was found to be a "secret" - but the court made it clear. It was not. And by the way, the Lions book could never be legally bought - it was the most copied text around. The whole term "Open Systems" was used to define Unix to being with. The idea is that Unix was the first of OS that people really knew what was happening under the covers. There were no secrets - you got / could get the sources (even with Sys V) but it might cost $s. I also understand the disappointment that many of you had because you did not have access to the sources. I get it. I see that would have been frustrating. Particularly when it was so close and yet so far. And it does seem like it was club that you couldn't belong, which I find sad because many of never looked at that way. I also see that if you were not in that club, you might be seen by some "in the club" as not having done anything "worthwhile" and need to "prove" something. If that is what how you feel, I truly want to make sure you understand I do not believe either of those things and never have. Josh -- all I am asking is you to be respectful of the term and the folks that created it, industry and frankly the market and opportunity that Linux and today's tech has so wonderful exploited. So I ask you to please call it Free and Open and I'm fine either way, although it will grate me when I see you and other make that misunderstanding. I believe that Linux was and >>is<< important and it does matter!!! The Cool Kids did something, I am many others are thankful and proud of them for doing ... it Linux is an great piece of technology and its paying a lot of bills for a lot of people today (including me). I do not want to be seen and knocking Linux in anyway. But I do see a lot of people "knocking" Unix because it was not "free" and frankly it was a different world. That's why I'm trying help explain the difference. Maybe it is too subtle for you to see and you had to live it to fully understand it. I fear you think because I did have access to sources, I think I was some how special. My point has always been, we really were not. Other than the specialness of the time was based on economics, because the cost of the systems that ran UNIX was so high, that was what limited. Which comes back to my main thesis... this is an argument about economics and cost -- WINTEL economics changed things -- so the question is asked -- did having access to the sources play into the openness or not? My point is that it was open >>before<< WINTEL existed, so you can change it being open or not. What "Free UNIX" did was make the "wisdom" spread even faster - it was an accelerant but it did not change the basic piece. UNIX was different .. it was open... it open up minds and created and industry, which now Linux (a "free" UNIX implementation) is undisputed leader - created by some cool folks that I personally very much respect and admire. I do fear a problem is that you seem to be equating "open" with "having access to the source" - where as the term was coined to mean "the ideas are available for all to see and share in" - as in a mathematical, and academic style of openness. Open University, Open Book, Open Ideas etc... I suspect your definition has narrowed that definition to include that unless the sources are in front of you, *the ideas are not really available; *which is why I cringe and it is a hot button for me and I find it wrong. In the end, definition does not change the status of what Unix was. It was the definition of Open Systems -- it was published and I do stand behind that. And in the end, it could not be claimed as trade secret because it was ->> by definition<<- open and known. But traditional Unix from AT&T was never >>free<< and that fact is not going to change either. It may some how in the future, but that past is true and as a result, Linus and other did an end-around and created and awesome >>free<< solution. Clem On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 7:46 PM, Arthur Krewat &lt;krewat(a)kilonet.net&gt; wrote:

I tripped across a project the other day which was a commercial, proprietary, and undocumented system that still used "Open" in their company name. I'm trying to figure out what aspect they are claiming is open. -----Original Message----- From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Steve Nickolas Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2017 9:27 PM To: Clem Cole Cc: TUHS main list Subject: Re: [TUHS] System Economics (was is Linux "officially branded UNIX") "Free" and "open" are, by themselves, ambiguous words. It is when you combine them that you get the meaning that is often intended by Linux, GNU and OpenBSD people. -uso.

On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 8:45 PM, Clem Cole &lt;clemc(a)ccc.com&gt; wrote: [...] Hmm, this is quite interesting, but I had different impression of the definition of "open" at the time: it seemed like what people were saying when they said that Unix was "open" was much less about the source code, but rather about the interfaces and APIs; in particular especially after the standards bodies got together and starting writing down how things were supposed to work. This led to vendor independence (to some extent, anyway) and was a distinction from closed systems which were defined by a single vendor who controlled everything about them (though presumably modulated by customer demand), including the OS (since this was usually written in-house for each platform. This even makes historical sense: Unix was written by a third party who didn't design the hardware). Consider DEC: In 1981, they had at least three hardware platforms intended for the timesharing market, each running multiple operating systems: PDP-11 running RSX-11*, RT-11, RSTS/E and Ultrix-11 (Unix); PDP-10 running TOPS-10 and TOPS-20; VAX running VMS and Ultrix-32 (Unix). And this isn't to mention any of the other stuff they were selling/supporting (PDP-8's, etc). Of those software systems it's easy to see what Ultrix-11 and Ultrix-32 have in common; one has a reasonable shot at getting software written for one running on the other. Contrast with RT-11 and VMS, or even RT-11 and RSX. Similarly with IBM, CDC, HP, GE, etc. In other words, the "openness" in "open systems" wasn't about code *for the system itself*; it was about freedom from software lock-in to a particular hardware vendor. Or, perhaps, openness to multiple system vendors supporting the same customer-written code. "Open" in a sense closer to what we now call "open source" (meaning the source was available for inspection) came much later. - Dan C.

On 3/15/2017 8:45 PM, Clem Cole wrote: Believe it or not, somewhere I believe I have microfiche of VMS 4.0 source code somewhere. Which reminds me, I need to do something with that. It came from the same place as the other source code I have.

On 2017 Mar 15, 20:45, Clem Cole wrote: Clem, I am respectful of you and of all the list members from whose experience and direct contact with "primordial Unix" I try to constantly learn. I, however, try to express opinion on the "openness" of Unix (post V7). Nobody has been able to write a Unix from scratch without having had access to the Unix source code: Tannenbaum had access to the Unix sources before writing Minix, Linus had access to Minix source before writing Linux, and in Dennis Ritchie's opinion Coherent was a "rewritten Unix" done with the Unix sources printed next to the keyboard ("some parts were written with our source nearby, but at least the effort had been made to rewrite"). GNU rewrote all the surrounding Unix tools from scratch, that's true, but they could not a kernel make. So much for "openness of concepts". It's the source that matters. Anything else, is ivory-towerism. Post Lions' book being forbidden, Unix can boast little openness. Regards, -- Josh Good

Chet Ramey wrote: I have copies of the old 8086/8088 PC Xenix. I don't know if SCO or Microsoft even sold the sources. My old boss ran very early Microsoft SCO on a PDP11. Don't know if he had sources. Even working as a sysadmin for an AT&T oem of System V wouldn't get me access to the source through normal corporate means. Perhaps I could've bribed an engineer with a Pizza to let me get to his machine without a screen lock... but he'd have been risking his job. Bill -- Digital had it then. Don't you wish you could buy it now! pechter-at-gmail.com http://xkcd.com/705/

Josh Good wrote: Having worked at a minicomputer company (Concurrent Computer Corporation) back in the 87 days... I can say that there was no way I could access the SysV sources without being an approved developer or support engineer. I was the IT Systems Administrator with the company managing their Xelos SysVR2 systems in the MIS department and I had no access. When I found a serious bug they looked at it. Reproduced it. Reported it to AT&T who checked the will not fix box on their ticket and closed the bug. The problem was that cron would malloc memory until it couldn't get any more and core dump. This stopped automatic backups and jobs from being scheduled reliably and was critical to my operations. The fix was I had to write a script to kill -0 cron with a sleep... and if the job was no longer there -- restart cron. AT&T support basically said "Get a machine that implements demand paged virtual memory and it won't happen." Pretty sad. I had worked for DEC and other places that would've fixed the code for a customer. Especially an OEM. Concurrent had pretty much put Unix on the back burner until they bought Masscomp. Their only OS they were pushing at the time was OS/32. Xelos was a pretty decent SVR5.2 port -- the next version even had ksh in it. I wanted to get a 3280 and see how Xelos on it compared with something equivalent on a VAX 8650. Bill Pechter(a)gmail.com

One of the problems was the hardware system price ratio to software system price. When you could get a 486 PC for $5-10k and the SysV source license (for 4.3BSD!) was $100k, it seemed rather monstrously disproportionate. :) This mismatch didn't exist in the Minicomputer world, where a VAX cost rather more than $5-10k and the price for a source license was thus not disproportionate. FWVLIW Wesley Parish Quoting Clem Cole &lt;clemc(a)ccc.com&gt;: "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor, Method for Guitar "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

On Wed, 15 Mar 2017, Josh Good wrote: Perhaps I'm confused (not uncommon) but I have distinct memories of having a source licence for my BSD/OS system on a 386... -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 8:16 PM, Jason Stevens &lt;jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com&gt; wrote: In June 1993, you could already get FreeBSD, NetBSD and 386BSD as well as BSD 4.4-lite. I think Minix was also available and several other 'also ran' Unix clones of the era whose names have slipped from my memory.... Most of the folks in this thread are lamenting the era before the Net2 release when nothing was available without some kind of encumbrance. And they do have a point. Where you went to school mattered a lot for how much access to the sources you could get. But I was at a school that had a liberal source access policy. You asked Mike and he told you where to find the source. :) Mike was the director of the computer center, and he also told you not to release it and it would be an expellable offense if you shared it or copied off the servers. But at the time, I didn't have enough disk space on my PC to do that.... and I always had dialin access to the encumbered 4.2BSD sources as well as the SunOS 3.x sources. But without a machine to run it on, it was hard to hack the kernel, or even know the good kernel code from the bad with certainty.... Wasn't until my senior year that the OS course switched over from writing an OS for a TOPS-20-like machine emulated on a TOPS-20 machine to writing modules to replace bits of SunOS with your own code... It was also part of an evolving notion of "OPEN". The SunOS systems were Open. Totally Open. All the protocols they used were documented and others could write implementations to them. And there was even a sample implementation for things like NFS. For the day, that was super open. Try it with VMS, which had some of the protocols documented and some of those you could implement w/o running afoul of DEC's (claimed) IP of various flavors... Sure, it isn't as Open as today, but it was the first steps down that path... So Unix has always been an open system. It's just that it's help drive the notion of Open, including motivating people to work on Linux while the last bits of it were being freed up and the inevitable legal hassles that caused.... Of course, various commercial flavors complicated this picture significantly.... But various commercial Linux vendors don't really release their sources today, so it can be hard to get all the bits you need, especially in BSP land.... So Linux is open, but only mostly open since compliance isn't universal.... Warner