On 21 Feb 2017 13:24 +0100, from steffen(a)sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso): Not sure what you meant to show by that... The Linux kernel was originally released in September 1991 (and was Torvald's way of learning about the 80386). 0.12 was the first GPL'd version, released in February 1992; and 1.0 was released in March 1994. So we are just about 23 years past Linux kernel 1.0. -- 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 Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 10:02 AM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: If I may, I think there was an additional thing at play: Linux was essentially Unix. Linux "won" because people wanted low-cost or free (as in gratis) Unix with source that could run on modest commodity hardware, and Unix wasn't available at a price point that was reasonable for most individuals (certainly not with source). The people working on successor systems weren't trying to reinvent Unix: they were working on new systems that weren't Unix, but that's not what people wanted: Unix was good enough and people were familiar and comfortable with it and that's what they wanted. So Linux comes along and it's basically a "simplest possible solution" Unix, freely available, runs on a PC, comes with source, and wasn't mired in a lawsuit brought by a major US company. It was the right thing in the right place at the right time. I think there's a network effect that blinds a lot of folks to this reality. Most of the folks on this list had access to Unix source and, with no disrespect intended, it's easy to lose sight of what a big deal that was. But unless you were in a position to already have access to it, it was remarkably difficult to come by. Linux filled a gap that a lot of people were looking to have filled. - Dan C.

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 8:50 PM, Dan Cross &lt;crossd(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: ​But that is of course my point. Linux is (was) UNIX, AND ... "UNIX" as a free UNIX *was *available at the time.​ ​Indeed - that was 386BSD.​ At first anyone with a source license (which was just about anyone at University - so that means students like Linus BTW), and most commercial places had access to the BSD license. The ftp site for download 'Jolix' as some one called it earlier today was pretty much the worst kept secret on the Internet. All you had to do is ask, and you could find it and once NET/2 was released, and then FreeBSD, NetBSD et al came to be it was all over. They key was in the case of 386BSD, you want to ask for it (and officially needed a license to ask), but long before Linux shows up there were >>freely<< available PC/UNIX systems. And you point, which is 100% in agreement with my own is that under the rules of Christiansen disruption, a PC/386 based UNIX that was "cheap enough" was going to win. The question Noel asked was why did *this flavor *of UNIX win over the others since there were other choices. That is what I tried to answer. As Larry and I both pointed out, if the BSDi/AT&T suit had not occurred the "hackers" which Larry described very well in his document, were going to find something. 386BSD was that place. Then it got clouded in legal nonsense and lot of us fled. Larry suggest there were other reasons. He and many others think the GPL/2 vs the BSD license was important. I really don't think so. But that's less of an argument. The key is that the BSD version was cloud in legal issues (and as Larry pointed out some strong personalities). ​... ​Exactly ... ​ Linux arrive at the right time, free of the *perceived* legal issues. The sad truth is that if AT&T had won, technically Linux would have had to be removed from the market in the US and NATO countries. I'll not try to speculate what would have happened then other than to say the not only was cow out of the barn, th ​e​ barn had caught fire so there was not place to put it back. ​Actually, I always found that a strange statement. I hear you and no disrespect intended, but I fear that people that make that claim just did not know where to look. It was ignorance (not stupidity mind you) - just lack of knowledge that is was available. I'm going to ask Dan, were you not at an university at time? Most schools in the US and Europe had BSD licenses. If you working, I can understand it somewhat. Many people's first UNIX experience was on a Sun Workstation so those folks did not have UNIX source licenses. But if you were at a either a University or commercial enterprise with a AT&T and BSD license, All it took was making sure you university had one and sending and email to the UCB folks (which many of us on this list were some of the folks that might have read it).​ They reply (I if I got searching through old email I might even have a copy of some where) basically was the url of the blind ftp address to pull the iso off the ucb ftp site. It was incredibly easy to get but you did have to have ftp access (and know the magic path - which if you asked was easy to get). Even with the first ISO, at one point, I seem to remember the bazillion *BSD floppies showed up on the one of the netnews channels and clogging up the dial-up links for a few days. The point was if you were at all in the community, it was pretty easy to find the BSD code. Which brings me to my point... many developers abandoned it - and most of them certainly know how to get it. They why I think the incorrect belief that legal entanglement (miss guided as it turned out) where not there with Linux. By the time the legal case was settled, the developed had "completed enough" of what was missing in Linux from *BSD that many folks never went back. And the newbie never knew any better. ​Agreed..​ but that gap would not have been there if the AT&T legal case had not clouded it all. Imagine that if the case had no occurred, the hackers were already working with *BSD. So then the question comes which Larry raises, was the UNIX personalities and/or the licensing what would have caused Linux to rise. I don't think so, because BSD had too much of a lead - already had networking, windowing, and in fact had a "better" installer on a PC/386. The first stuff "distro" that was at all reasonably easy t install was a PC was slackware and that was partly because they pulled a bunch of stuff from the stuff Jordan had created. But they problem was that FreeBSD et al was starting under a legal cloud, I know I was worried. I ran it on two of my systems, but was working on Linux on another to hedge my bet. I was not sure BSDi/UCB would win, so I started helping make Linux work better too. Clem

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 11:07:20PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: My experience at UWisc-Madison, during the time they were working on 4.3-Uwisc, matches Dan's pretty well. Yup, source was there. Access was restricted, you had to get a login on slovax, and you had to be "somebody" to get that login. I don't remember how I got access, I just knew I wanted it. So I probably just begged and eventually one of the admins took pity on me? Dunno. I don't think it was like what Clem says for most people. Clem went to CMU if I remember correctly, that puts him in a pretty elite class right there. I can easily imagine that the CMU CS department let all their students have access to the source if they wanted it. I don't think that was anywhere near as common as Clem thinks it was. My guess is that Clem interacted with a bunch of people who were his peers (aka pretty elite people) and all those guys had source access. Us unwashed masses had to work a lot harder to get it. Once 386BSD came out, yeah, source was easy. Not before. Even when I was at Sun the historic source was there, v7, 32v, etc., but you had to get past Shannon to get at it.

On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 10:31 AM, Nemo &lt;cym224(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: ​I hear you and accept that was your experience, but I do find that it is interesting, that one of the most infamous and notorious UNIX hackers of all time is Henry Spenser of the UT Zoology Dept - not Math, not CS or EE.

On Thu, 23 Feb 2017, Clem Cole wrote: Spencer, not Spenser; I actually met him when he visited Australia, and he's about the most unassuming guy you will ever meet. His email address was something like *vax!utzoo!henry. -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

On Thu, 23 Feb 2017, Clem Cole wrote: Yep; his USENET fame did not go to his head. And if my failing memory serves me correctly, he wrote C-News in conjunction with Geoff Collier, as B-News was starting to show its age and limitations. All of which of course got blown away when NNTP arrived... There was an infamous USENET forgery of him, complete with his style and diction, and Henry actually congratulated the forger! Sigh; those were the days... Now everything is based upon instant gratification by the kiddie brigade (overnight batch jobs on ye olde 360/50, anyone?). -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

I always hear that universities had access, but it wasn’t undergrads in 1000 level classes that arrived. Asking for that kind of thing was either greeted with laughs, or should shrugging. Access to anything like that was for either graduate students or people ‘in the click’ and people just arriving were neither. Just like the partitioning code that was apparently common, none of this stuff was available to anyone that simply didn’t know as there was no central clearing house of information. And I gather the fear of AT&T meant it wasn’t anything anyone was willing to share. Not everyone got 20th generation photocopies of the Lions book, nor did they get access to anything other than what teachers were willing to let kids have access to. Prior to Net/2 people were trying to hack milnet to find BSD source code. And even when Net/2 was a thing I can tell you that in south Florida among hackers I knew that were my age, none of us had heard of it, or knew anything about it. When people saw us kids swapping floppies, and lugging around our 386’s to do Linux install parties nobody ever once mentioned anything about having BSD source or anything. It was a very much gated community, and new students were certainly not welcome. In those regards it really is no surprise that Linux used nothing from places with ‘source licenses’ as nothing in that was available to actually look at. Another thing that killed Net/2 was that second networking package for Linux, surprisingly called NET2 shared an incredibly similar name, and even in it’s readme: NOTE: In this document, ``NET-2'' does not refer to the Berkeley Software Distribution NET-2 release of BSD UNIX. Yes, the names are conflicting. In this FAQ, ``NET-2'' refers only to the new generation of TCP/IP code in the Linux kernel. And I’m sure the lawyers were happy that way as us 1000 level kids didn’t care and would happily steal said source, and try to use it. Even today I’m finding out about this CMU Mach+4.3BSD that was available in 1990, and I suspect there are other i386 based BSD’s that could have filled some kind of gap but either chose not to, or were at best public secrets. Just as I’m sure if the non Portuguese world had heard of Tropix (http://www.tropix.nce.ufrj.br/) it too may have had a following. Had AT&T won, there was no stopping Linux though. It didn’t use anything from AT&T, and back then it was still based on a.out, and some people were looking at using COFF... After AT&T’s defeat did the whole ELF thing come, and then there was the lawsuits on API’s and headers. If anything I’m more so surprised that the USSR with their stolen BSD didn’t push some kind of Soviet UNIX (DEMOS) into the west, to ride that whole ‘free’ software thing. Or they were just too politically blind, and figured that westerns would be highly suspicious of Russians pushing stolen American tech. Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Clem Cole Sent: Thursday, 23 February 2017 11:27 AM To: Dan Cross Cc: TUHS main list; Noel Chiappa Subject: Re: [TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 8:50 PM, Dan Cross &lt;crossd(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: If I may, I think there was an additional thing at play: Linux was essentially Unix. ​But that is of course my point.   Linux is (was) UNIX, AND ...  "UNIX" as a free UNIX was available at the time.​   Linux "won" because people wanted low-cost or free (as in gratis) Unix with source that could run on modest commodity hardware, and Unix wasn't available at a price point that was reasonable for most individuals (certainly not with source). ​Indeed - that was 386BSD.​   At first anyone with a source license (which was just about anyone at University - so that means students like Linus BTW), and most commercial places had access to the BSD license.  The ftp site for download 'Jolix' as some one called it earlier today was pretty much the worst kept secret on the Internet.   All you had to do is ask, and you could find it and once NET/2 was released, and then FreeBSD, NetBSD et al came to be it was all over. They key was in the case of 386BSD, you want to ask for it (and officially needed a license to ask), but long before Linux shows up there were >>freely<< available PC/UNIX systems. And you point, which is 100% in agreement with my own is that under the rules of Christiansen disruption, a PC/386 based UNIX that was "cheap enough" was going to win. The question Noel asked was why did this flavor of UNIX win over the others since there were other choices.   That is what I tried to answer.   As Larry and I both pointed out, if the BSDi/AT&T suit had not occurred the "hackers" which Larry described very well in his document, were going to find something.   386BSD was that place.   Then it got clouded in legal nonsense and lot of us fled. Larry suggest there were other reasons.  He and many others think the GPL/2 vs the BSD license was important.  I really don't think so.  But that's less of an argument.   The key is that the BSD version was cloud in legal issues (and as Larry pointed out some strong personalities).   ​...   So Linux comes along and it's basically a "simplest possible solution" Unix, freely available, runs on a PC, comes with source, and wasn't mired in a lawsuit brought by a major US company. It was the right thing in the right place at the right time. ​Exactly ... ​ Linux arrive at the right time, free of the perceived legal issues.  The sad truth is that if AT&T had won, technically Linux would have had to be removed from the market in the US and NATO countries.   I'll not try to speculate what would have happened then other than to say the not only was cow out of the barn, th ​e​ barn had caught fire so there was not place to put it back.   I think there's a network effect that blinds a lot of folks to this reality. Most of the folks on this list had access to Unix source and, with no disrespect intended, it's easy to lose sight of what a big deal that was. But unless you were in a position to already have access to it, it was remarkably difficult to come by. ​Actually, I always found that a strange statement.  I hear you and no disrespect intended, but  I fear that people that make that claim just did not know where to look.  It was ignorance (not stupidity mind you) - just lack of knowledge that is was available. I'm going to ask Dan, were you not at an university at time?  Most schools in the US and Europe had BSD licenses.  If you working, I can understand it somewhat.   Many people's first UNIX experience was on a Sun Workstation so those folks did not have UNIX source licenses.   But if you were at a either a University or commercial enterprise with a AT&T and BSD license,  All it took was making sure you university had one and sending and email to the UCB folks (which many of us on this list were some of the folks that might have read it).​ They reply (I if I got searching through old email I might even have a copy of some where) basically was the url of the blind ftp address to pull the iso off the ucb ftp site.  It was incredibly easy to get but you did have to have ftp access (and know the magic path - which if you asked was easy to get).   Even with the first ISO, at one point, I seem to remember the bazillion *BSD floppies showed up on the one of the netnews channels and clogging up the dial-up links for a few days. The point was if you were at all in the community, it was pretty easy to find the BSD code.   Which brings me to my point... many developers abandoned it - and most of them certainly know how to get it.  They why I think the incorrect belief that legal entanglement (miss guided as it turned out) where not there with Linux. By the time the legal case was settled, the developed had "completed enough" of what was missing in Linux from *BSD that many folks never went back.   And the newbie never knew any better.     Linux filled a gap that a lot of people were looking to have filled. ​Agreed..​ but that gap would not have been there if the AT&T legal case had not clouded it all.   Imagine that if the case had no occurred, the hackers were already working with *BSD. So then the question comes which Larry raises, was the UNIX personalities and/or the licensing what would have caused Linux to rise. I don't think so, because BSD had too much of a lead - already had networking, windowing, and in fact had a "better" installer on a PC/386.   The first stuff "distro" that was at all reasonably easy t install was a PC was slackware and that was partly because they pulled a bunch of stuff from the stuff Jordan had created. But they problem was that FreeBSD et al was starting under a legal cloud, I know I was worried.  I ran it on two of my systems, but was working on Linux on another to hedge my bet.  I was not sure BSDi/UCB would win, so I started helping make Linux work better too. Clem

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 01:58:40PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote: So I was also at SGI, I know the whole XFS (and XLV) team, and I know the code pretty well, I plugged it into NFS so that NFS could use all that bandwidth: http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/talks/bds.pdf In terms of crash worthyness, ext2 was better. I think the ext2 people took the approach that they wanted to be as robust as dos but with performance. And they made it, it's some very nice work. Nope. And I sort of made my name working on FFS with srk, I'm a fan of what FFS/UFS could do but ext2 went way way further. And did so pretty quickly, far more quickly than any of the Unix shops would have done, they were more cautious. The linux kids were like the young guys you got straight out of school and told them to do the impossible. Once in a while, they did. Sort of. i think a far bigger deal was that he commanded respect, there were lots of stories floating around like when people sent him patches he knew the code well enough that an context diff was enough context that he'd see a bug in the patch, edit the patch, and apply it. I've seen him do that, he's a programmer's programmer. Unlike a lot of leaders who lead but when they have to get their hands dirty they are sort of wussy.

On Tue, 21 Feb 2017, Larry McVoy wrote: Wouldn't "as robust as DOS" be a *bad* thing? -uso.

Now that brings up another reason why I think Linux won. Most of the early Linux developers were educated partly in the MS/PC/DR DOS world. They wanted a Unix, but they had bought IBM PC clones with MS DOS and were familiar with the DOS way of doing things. Linux's disk partitioning is very familiar to anyone who's familiar with the DOS way of disk partitioning. BSD's disk partitioning is a culture shock. (I know. I'd gotten used to the DOS way of doing things after learning about disk partitioning with my 486 and IBM OS/2 - the hard way. I tried Linux and the terminology was the same and due to a neat trick with the DOS filesystem I could experiment with it on an unchanged DOS system. I then tried FreeBSD and I didn't understand the terminology. So I stuck with what I'd learnt.) FWLIW :) Wesley Parish Quoting Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.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

Anyone interested in this source code? I did a quick Google search and couldn't find anything relevant. If it's out there somewhere, let me know, I'd like to take a look at it. It's Network File System Sun Microsystems Release 2.0 Where I got it from, that will remain nameless, used it to compile against BSD 4.3 on VAX, and possibly even 4.2 Is it not releasable? I also seem to have version 3.2, but I need to verify that. For example: /* @(#)showmount.c 1.3 87/08/13 3.2/4.3NFSSRC */ thanks! -- Arthur Krewat krewat(a)kilonet.net

So what's the consensus at this point? Open source? Already released? I can't vouch that this wasn't some under-the-table exchange. It was for an "educational" institution but did not necessarily wind up there. Hence why I want to compare with similar releases if it exists. The sources all have copyright dates ranging from 1983 to 1985 for Sun-generated bits that looks like this: static char sccsid[] = &quot;(a)(#)domainname.c 1.1 85/05/30 Copyr 1984 Sun Micro"; And sccsid's like this for sources taken from BSD and altered to fit: df.c:static char sccsid[] = &quot;(a)(#)df.c 1.1 85/05/30 SMI"; /* from UCB 4.18 84/02/02 */ Sorry for fracturing this thread already. On 2/21/2017 8:46 PM, Clem Cole wrote:

It got to the list. I think you didn't get an answer because noone here knows what to tell you. I suggest working off-list with Warren to get him the code and help him try to figure out if he can publish it. Arnold Arthur Krewat &lt;krewat(a)kilonet.net&gt; wrote:

In the release.ms included on the tape: "This section lists the steps required to install this distribution on a Vax running 4.2" And from bin/passwd.c, for example: static char sccsid[] = &quot;(a)(#)passwd.c 1.1 85/05/30 SMI"; /* from UCB 4.4 82/07/10 */ Yet, from the 4.3 Uwisc passwd.c on tuhs.org: static char sccsid[] = &quot;(a)(#)passwd.c 4.24 (Berkeley) 5/28/86"; On 2/21/2017 9:07 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:

Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.com&gt; wrote: It was posted in a USENET source group. My archive of UUNET's ftp site with all the sources group archivess from ~ 2004 is also in the archives, so it should be findable. Thanks, Arnold

On Sat, Feb 25, 2017 at 06:57:31AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote: I've added NFSv2, the BBN and the SRC-NOSC networking code to the Unix Tree: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl Cheers, Warren

Yeah slices? A: b: c: d: e:? But C: is the whole drive??? I had some really old BSD book that talks about needing 4 people to install a harddisk as they were so heavy, and talking about it’s massive ‘500MB’ capacity (Eagle drive on a VAX?) but it certainly didn’t fit in the DOS / OS/2 / Windows NT world. And OS/2 was so much like MS-DOS needing to reboot and so clunky, while Windows NT let you partition at will, and even concatenating disks, or setting up software raid with absolute ease it made you wonder why it always was so difficult on anything else. Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Wesley Parish Sent: Thursday, 23 February 2017 7:14 AM To: Larry McVoy Cc: TUHS main list; Noel Chiappa Subject: Re: [TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other Now that brings up another reason why I think Linux won. Most of the early Linux developers were educated partly in the MS/PC/DR DOS world. They wanted a Unix, but they had bought IBM PC clones with MS DOS and were familiar with the DOS way of doing things. Linux's disk partitioning is very familiar to anyone who's familiar with the DOS way of disk partitioning. BSD's disk partitioning is a culture shock. (I know. I'd gotten used to the DOS way of doing things after learning about disk partitioning with my 486 and IBM OS/2 - the hard way. I tried Linux and the terminology was the same and due to a neat trick with the DOS filesystem I could experiment with it on an unchanged DOS system. I then tried FreeBSD and I didn't understand the terminology. So I stuck with what I'd learnt.) FWLIW :) Wesley Parish Quoting Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.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

I got to thinking about the file system sync vs. order argument as a result of this interesting discussion. Back in NJ in 1998 I had a 144-node PC cluster. It started with 80 FreeBSD nodes, and a few months later we add 64 Linux nodes. It was DARPA funded and we were looking at issues around clustering. What we discovered, when we added the Linux cluster, was that building power was really terrible. We had not realized it with the freebsd cluster because it tended to cleanly recover from unplanned nasty power cycles. But the Linux cluster tended to always have a small number of nodes that did not get through fsck. yeah, it's not that good a data point maybe, but we found it interesting.

That was pretty early, Ron. I betcha if you tried it now (or 10 years ago) things would be different. On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 01:04:16AM +0000, ron minnich wrote: -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 03:45:54AM +0000, ron minnich wrote: I lived through all this and payed close attention to all of the people involved (Theo has/had my Sun 4/470, we argued about VM systems in my flat in SF, Jolitz worked for me, I hung with Chris Demetriou back in the 386BSD days, I was all over that stuff and wanted it to succeed). The open source BSD stuff was a train wreck from the very beginning. Nobody could get along with Jolitz, so NetBSD started, then Theo wanted to be in charge of something so OpenBSD was born. I can't remember how FreeBSD got spun out, but what I do remember is that there were power struggles from day 1. Everyone thought they were better than the other guy, when in fact, what was pretty good was the BSD source base and most of these people, initially, had very little skin in the game in the form of code, they were all leveraging the BSD source base. I actually think Jolitiz had more code in there in the beginning than anyone else. No matter who did what, they couldn't / wouldn't / didn't rally around a single leader and a single project. So it was "divide and fail" where Linux was a big tent, anyone who could write decent code was welcome, but you had to get it past Linus. Which was fine, people figured out he had a clue and put up with the fact that they had to get past his filter (many of us, myself included, valued that filter very, very much). By 1998/1999, all of these BSD struggles for power were blindingly obvious to anyone who was remotely paying attention. I think they were obvious 4-5 years before that. And it wasn't obvious just to people like me, management types track this stuff far more than most people believe. They have to back the right horse or it costs them. Linux was simply a safer bet. The community was larger and growing very fast. I was program committee chair at Linux Expo in 1999 (sort of their Usenix at the time). It was way more fun than Usenix. I think a lot of the "better" stuff came from the fact that Linux got networking long after BSD had pretty sweet networking. The BSD guys still think their networking is better than Linux (pro tip, it is not, go read networking research papers, they all use Linux as the platform and it's not because there is so much to fix, it's because Linux networking is better). BSD hasn't been better than Linux in any way that I know of for about 15 years. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm