It probably was the partition/slice confusion that, well, confused me, then. My experience, such as it was, was from the DOS world. Although the period I am thinking of was way pre-slackware. You had a boot floppy and a root floppy and that was about it, I think. I think the kernel had MFM/RLL disk drivers for an ISA bus interface? I remember that I could boot the thing on the MCA machines in the lab but not actually install it (even had I been allowed to), and I think installation was pretty much fdisk/mkfs, extract the tarball...I don't remember how you installed the bootloader...which I guess was already LILO at that point? Probably just dding the bootsector to the first physical sector of the disk? Version 0.08 or so, maybe? It was quite a while ago, and I was drunk for most of college, so....memory is imprecise at best. On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 3:28 PM Clem cole wrote: > Not true 386BSD used fdisk. It shared the disk just fine. In fact I > liked the way it sliced the disk much better than Slackware in those days. > > Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not > quite. > > On Aug 28, 2019, at 4:27 PM, Adam Thornton wrote: > > I was an ardent OS/2 supporter for a long time. Sure, IBM's anemic > marketing, and their close-to-outright-hostility to 3rd-party developers > didn't help. But what killed it, really, was how damn good its 16-bit > support was. It *was* a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than > 3.11fW. So no one wrote to the relatively tiny market of 32-bit OS/2. > > I fear that had Linux not made the leap, MS might well have won. It's > largely the AOL-fuelled explosion of popularity of the Internet and Windows > ignoring same until too late that opened the door enough for Linux to jam > its foot in. > > Hurd was, by the time of the '386 Unix Wars and early Linux, clearly not > going to be a contender, I guess because it was about cool research > features rather than running user-facing code. I kept waiting for a usable > kernel to go with what Linux had already shown was a quite decent > userspace, but eventually had better things to do with my life (like chase > BeOS). It was like waiting for Perl 6--it missed its moment. > > Plan 9 and Amoeba were both really nifty. I never used Sprite. Neither > one of them had much of a chance in the real world. Much like Unix itself, > Linux's worse-is-better approach really worked. > > I have a hypothesis about Linux's ascendance too, which is a personal > anecdote I am inflating to the status of hypothesis. As I recall, the > *BSDs for 386 all assumed they owned the hard disk. Like, the whole > thing. You couldn't, at least in 1992, create a multiboot system--or at > least it was my strong impression you could not. I was an undergrad. I > had one '386 at my disposal, with one hard disk, and, hey, I needed DOS and > Windows to write my papers (I don't know about you, but I wanted to write > in my room, where I could have my references at hand and be reasonably > undisturbed; sure Framemaker was a much better setup than Word For Windows > 1.2 but having to use it in the computer lab made it a nonstarter for me). > Papers, and, well, to play games. Sure, that too. > > Linux let me defragment my drive, non-destructively repartition it, and > create a dual-boot system, so that I could both use the computer for school > and screw around on Linux. I'm probably not the only person for whom this > was a decisive factor. > > Adam > > On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 1:08 PM Christopher Browne > wrote: > >> On Mon, 26 Aug 2019 at 19:14, Arthur Krewat wrote: >> >>> >>> https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/26/0051234/celebrating-the-28th-anniversary-of-the-linux-kernel >>> >>> Leaving licensing and copyright issues out of this mental exercise, what >>> would we have now if it wasn't for Linux? Not what you'd WANT it to be, >>> although that can add to the discussion, but what WOULD it be? >>> >>> I'm not asking as a proponent of Linux. If anything, I was dragged >>> kicking and screaming into the current day and have begrudgingly ceded >>> my server space to Linux. >>> >>> But if not for Linux, would it be BSD? A System V variant? Or (the >>> horror) Windows NT? >>> >> >> I can make a firm "dunno" sound :-) >> >> Some facts can come together to point away from a number of >> possibilities... >> >> - If you look at the number of hobbyist "Unix homages" that emerged at >> around that time, it's clear that there was a sizable community of >> interested folk willing to build their own thing, and that weren't >> interested in Windows NT. (Nay, one should put that more strongly... That >> had their minds set on something NOT from Microsoft.) So I think we can >> cross Windows NT off the list. >> >> - OS/2 should briefly come on the list. It was likable in many ways, if >> only IBM had actually supported it... But it suffers from something of the >> same problem as Windows NT; there were a lot of folk that were only >> slightly less despising of IBM at the time than of Microsoft. >> >> - Hurd was imagined to be the next thing... >> >> To borrow from my cookie file... >> >> "Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from >> now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M >> SPARCstation-5." -- Andrew Tanenbaum, 1992. >> % >> "You'll be rid of most of us when BSD-detox or GNU comes out, which >> should happen in the next few months (yeah, right)." -- Richard Tobin, >> 1992. [BSD did follow within a year] >> % >> "I am aware of the benefits of a micro kernel approach. However, the >> fact remains that Linux is here, and GNU isn't --- and people have >> been working on Hurd for a lot longer than Linus has been working on >> Linux." -- Ted T'so, 1992. >> >> Ted has been on this thread, and should be amused (and slightly >> disturbed!) that his old statements are being held here and there, ready to >> trot out :-). >> >> In the absence of Linux, perhaps hackers would have flocked to Hurd, but >> there was enough going on that there was plenty of room for them to have >> done so anyways. >> >> I'm not sure what to blame on whatever happened post-1992, though I'd put >> some on Microsoft Research having taken the wind out of Mach's sails by >> hiring off a bunch of the relevant folk. In order for Hurd to "make it," >> Mach has to "make it," too, and it looked like they were depending on CMU >> to be behind that. (I'm not sure I'm right about that; happy to hear a >> better story.) >> >> Anyway, Hurd *might* have been a "next thing," and I don't think the >> popularity of Linux was enough to have completely taken wind out of its >> sails, given that there's the dozens of "Unix homages" out there. >> >> - I'd like to imagine Plan 9 being an alternative, but it was "properly >> commercial" for a goodly long time (hence not amenable to attaching waves >> of hackers to it to add their favorite device drivers), and was never taken >> as a serious answer. Many of us had admired it from afar via the Dr Dobbs >> Journal issue (when was that? mid or late '90s?) but only from afar. >> >> - FreeBSD is the single best answer I can throw up as a possibility, as >> it was the one actively targeting 80386 hardware. And that had the big >> risk of the AT&T lawsuit lurking over it, so had that gone in a different >> direction, then that is a branch sadly easily trimmed. >> >> If we lop both Linux and FreeBSD off the list of possibilities, I don't >> imagine Windows NT or OS/2 bubble to the top, instead, a critical mass >> would have stood behind ... something else, I'd think. I don't know which >> to suggest. >> -- >> When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the >> question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?" >> >