[TUHS] Re: DG UNIX History

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2022 at 01:03:05AM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> P.S.  I remember back in the day when I was engaging in a friendly
> competition with a FreeBSD hacker on improving the serial driver for
> the 8250 chip (with no FIFO's!), and I shared with him my idea of
> using a pair of ring buffers that would get flipped back and forth
> between the interrupt handler and the tty "bottom-half" (read:
> software interrupt) handler, and I was told that clists were handed
> down from Olympus by the AT&T/Unix Gods and he could never get that
> kind of change into the FreeBSD tty layer.  Of course, I was free to
> make all of the radical changes to Linux's tty layer --- and I did,
> all in the name of the number of 115kbaud connections that could be
> handled on a single 40 MHz 386 processor...

I remember being pleasantly surprised that Linus/Linux was open to 
that sort of change.  I get why the traditional Unix shops resisted
be wacks like that but they went too far and it prevented good work.

Linux seemed far more willing to realize that they had it wrong and
there was a better way.  That was refreshing.

Of course they got beat up for it with "Linux is stable/compatible".
-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat