The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: schily@schily.net (Joerg Schilling)
Subject: [TUHS] Re;  Mach for i486 / Mt Xinu or other
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2017 00:44:22 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <58acd0d6.lIWt8IAsU2xSUluK%schily@schily.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <201702212025.v1LKPhRp021592@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1393 bytes --]

Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> Had Ken thought that way, Unix's universal byte-addressable file format
> would never have happened; this mailing list would not exist; and we
> all might still be fluent in dialects of JCL. dd was sufficient glue
> to bridge the gap between Unix and **Most** Operating Systems.
> Meanwhile everyday use of Unix was freed from the majority's folly.

Ken was lucky as he did not need to honor constraints from other operating 
systems.

Hard disks are also much simpler to use than optical media with complex meta 
data.

BTW: do you know why UNIX did create something that is completely 
non-extensible like cpio or hard to extend like tar? We had to wait until 1997 
for Sun to propose a nice extensible archive format that has become the base 
for the POSIX.1-2001 TAR extension headers.

Do you know why UNIX had a "ps" command that could be used to create random 
junk output in 1982 because there was no interface to get reliable process 
information? At the same time, UNOS written at Charles River Data Systems by 
former AT&T engineers could do this right already.


Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/


      reply	other threads:[~2017-02-21 23:44 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2017-02-21 20:25 Doug McIlroy
2017-02-21 23:44 ` Joerg Schilling [this message]

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=58acd0d6.lIWt8IAsU2xSUluK%schily@schily.net \
    --to=schily@schily.net \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).