* [TUHS] Re; Mach for i486 / Mt Xinu or other
@ 2017-02-21 20:25 Doug McIlroy
2017-02-21 23:44 ` Joerg Schilling
0 siblings, 1 reply; 2+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2017-02-21 20:25 UTC (permalink / raw)
> 2) **Most** Operating systems do not support /dev/* based access to SCSI.
> This includes a POSIX certified system like Mac OS X.
>
> 3) **Most** Operating systems do not even support a file descriptor based
> interface to SCSI commands.
> This includes a POSIX certified system like Mac OS X.
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.
Doug
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 2+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re; Mach for i486 / Mt Xinu or other
2017-02-21 20:25 [TUHS] Re; Mach for i486 / Mt Xinu or other Doug McIlroy
@ 2017-02-21 23:44 ` Joerg Schilling
0 siblings, 0 replies; 2+ messages in thread
From: Joerg Schilling @ 2017-02-21 23:44 UTC (permalink / raw)
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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/
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2017-02-21 23:44 ` Joerg Schilling
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