From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: arnold@skeeve.com (arnold@skeeve.com) Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2017 13:18:30 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...] In-Reply-To: References: <20170222161114.GT9439@mcvoy.com> <20170222182440.GE9439@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <201702222018.v1MKIUKO030787@freefriends.org> I'll add my two cents. My experience was that source was hard to get to. My undergrad school had IS/1 - v6 on a PDP-11 - and source was definitely not available to us seniors. One person who actually worked for the computer center did have access. This was 1980-1981. In grad school at Georgia Tech, there was no access to students to the vax, and even after I went to work there I had to sign something first before seeing source. Later I was a sysadmin at Emory U and so I had source but it wasn't widely open. We ran Mt. Xinu 4.3 + BSD on vaxen, so there source was necessary. By the mid-80s, even if you had AT&T and BSD licenses, it didn't help, as there were lots of vendors NOT giving out source (Sun, Pyramid, DEC, Gould, DG, you name it). This was pretty much OK; things worked fairly well and you didn't need to fix drivers and recompile the kernel and so on on those machines. Vaxen were aging, BSD didn't support 8500s, and so if you wanted BSD you pretty much had to go to one of the vendors offering it. Sun was probably the most popular. At a startup company we ran ESIX, SVR3 (and later SVR4) based on 386s for our product alongside a few Sun boxen. It was a good Unix, but again no source, but no real need for it either. This was ~ 1990-1991. W.R.T. personal machines, I shelled out $$ to buy an AT&T 3B1 (68010 based, System V kernel, SVR2 user land + vi) which I used happily for many years. Later I bought a Sun IPC. (More $$.) Also used happily for quite a while. I only got into Intel land for myself when I moved to Israel, buying a laptop and running Linux on it. I had played some with Linux on Sparc and was fairly impressed with it. This was circa 1997. Linux generally "just works" out of the box on PC hardware, and with Debian/Ubuntu, software updates are a breeze. I spend almost no time having to be a sysadmin for myself, which is wonderful. I mostly watched the whole AT&T/BSD lawsuit stuff from the side. At one USENIX I remember talking to Keith Bostic about it, and understanding that it was trade secret, but I asked him "Given the book by Maurice Bach on how UNIX works, how can they still think it's trade secret?" He just sorta nodded and said "yep" or something equivalent. But yes, the sense while it was going on was definitely that BSD was risky and problematic. And that the whole lawsuit thing was really, REALLY stupid. Sigh. Arnold