From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: schily@schily.net (Joerg Schilling) Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2017 00:44:22 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Re; Mach for i486 / Mt Xinu or other In-Reply-To: <201702212025.v1LKPhRp021592@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201702212025.v1LKPhRp021592@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <58acd0d6.lIWt8IAsU2xSUluK%schily@schily.net> Doug McIlroy 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/