[TUHS] Was the SVID A Foregone Conclusion Pre-usr group?

[TUHS] Was the SVID A Foregone Conclusion Pre-usr group?

[segaloco via TUHS]

I'm curious if anyone has the scoop on this.  To my knowledge the 1984
/usr/group standard constitutes the earliest attempt at a vendor-neutral UNIX
standard.  AT&T then comes along in 1985 with the first issue of the SVID, based
largely on SVR2 from what I know.

What I'm not getting a good read on or not is if the SVID was literally a direct
response from AT&T to the creation of the /usr/group standard or if there was
already an impetus in AT&T's sphere of influence to produce such a definitive
document.  In either case, AT&T does list the /usr/group standard as an
influence, but doesn't go into the detail of "we made this because /usr/group's
standard exists" or "we made this ourselves and oh /usr/group also happens to
have a standard."

Even outside of this, did AT&T maintain anything comparable to the SVID in prior
years or was the manual essentially the interface definition?

Thanks for any recollections!

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: Was the SVID A Foregone Conclusion Pre-usr group?

[Clem Cole]

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below.

On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 12:01 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> I'm curious if anyone has the scoop on this.  To my knowledge the 1984
> /usr/group standard constitutes the earliest attempt at a vendor-neutral
> UNIX
> standard.  AT&T then comes along in 1985 with the first issue of the SVID,
> based
> largely on SVR2 from what I know.
>
> There was a huge marketing campaign, "*System V. Consider it Standard*."
But the >>users<<, particularly those weaned on BSD, said "hardly."
/usr/group was an attempt to deal with Ultrix, HP-UX, AIX, and, much less,
Sys III/V.  SVID came later, and it was an attempt to force it down
people's throats.
The AT&T folks were sometimes a tad nasty at the POSIX meeting and wanted
IEEE to "just use it," and we say, "no.  It's incomplete and just plain
wrong is so many places."    The whole tar/cpio stuff from /usr/group was a
great example of the start of it, but even things like trying to define a
directory entry was strained.   SVID did not have the new UCB directory
system calls. For example, we all were certain that if we ever had a
different FS, we needed to remove physical formats from the specification.
 There were no sockets, and yet nearly 100% of the working networking code
in the wild, including on MS-DOS, was using sockets.

The problem was that several people who came to the POSIX meetings
post-SVID from AT&T were from marketing and sales. At the same time, the
core of the original /usr/group and later POSIX teams were mostly
engineering types.   The sales/mktg folks were trying to establish a brand,
the engineers were trying to solve an issue were we had code that did not
work between our different systems.
ᐧ

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[TUHS] Whither XVT? [ From the SVID thread ]

[arnold]

Hi Marc,

Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:

> I was on a different committee that was trying to standardize a universal
> GUI interface that could work on any GUI, including Mac, Windows, Motif,
> and OpenLook. My product, XVT, was the base document. We never got past the
> draft stage.

I think XVT also supported libcurses, no?

Around 1990-1991 I was in a start-up company and we looked at XVT
for the UI we wanted to write.  I remember being in the confeerence room
on a phone call with you, and thinking how cool it was that we were
talking to one of those famous UNIX guys who'd been at Bell Labs.

A modern incarnation of your idea is the Qt toolkit, which lets one
write C++ UI (and more) code that runs the same on Windows, Mac, *nix,
and these days maybe even Android and iPhone.

In any case, is the XVT code around somewhere?

Thanks,

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Whither XVT? [ From the SVID thread ]

[arnold]

Thanks for the info Marc.

Looks like Providence Software XVT is indeed a cross-platform
toolkit.

Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:

> Arnold,
>
> I left XVT around 1992 or so and shortly after that it was absorbed into a
> California company owned by XVT's VC investor. Then the XVT assets were
> sold to someone and it was operated for some years as an independent
> company, but I don't know what happened after that. I haven't had any
> contact at all with XVT for over 30 years.
>
> Poking around, I see this website:
>
> https://providencesoftware.com/
>
> where XVT seems still to exist. But that's just from Googling; I don't have
> any other knowledge.
>
> Indeed XVT supported character displays in addition to GUIs.
>
> Marc
>
> On Sun, May 18, 2025 at 12:14 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi Marc,
> >
> > Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I was on a different committee that was trying to standardize a universal
> > > GUI interface that could work on any GUI, including Mac, Windows, Motif,
> > > and OpenLook. My product, XVT, was the base document. We never got past
> > the
> > > draft stage.
> >
> > I think XVT also supported libcurses, no?
> >
> > Around 1990-1991 I was in a start-up company and we looked at XVT
> > for the UI we wanted to write.  I remember being in the confeerence room
> > on a phone call with you, and thinking how cool it was that we were
> > talking to one of those famous UNIX guys who'd been at Bell Labs.
> >
> > A modern incarnation of your idea is the Qt toolkit, which lets one
> > write C++ UI (and more) code that runs the same on Windows, Mac, *nix,
> > and these days maybe even Android and iPhone.
> >
> > In any case, is the XVT code around somewhere?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Arnold
> >
>
>
> -- 
> Subscribe to my Photo-of-the-Week emails at my website mrochkind.com.

[TUHS] Re: Was the SVID A Foregone Conclusion Pre-usr group?

[Tom Lyon]

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Just for historical accuracy - I believe Bill Shannon first had the New
Hampshire UNIX plate and Armando got it after Bill moved to Sun.
Evidence: https://photos.app.goo.gl/FYR17LRpJNpSBCGv8

On Sat, May 17, 2025 at 7:59 AM Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 6:26 PM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>
>> Sort of like when DEC finally recognized that people were buying their
>> hardware to run UNIX.   Still remember Armando getting up and saying
>> something to the effect that DEC hardware and UNIX had been synonymous for
>> years and that DEC finally noticed and the held up the first DEC UNIX
>> license (plate).
>>
>> Clem Cole had--and still has--the Massachusetts UNIX license plate on his
> car.  I don't know when he first got that plate.  Armando had the New
> Hampshire UNIX license plate.   It was on a snazzy red Datsun 280 ZX.  At
> the time (early 1980s) I was driving a frumpy rust-bucket Datsun B210.  I
> had the New Hampshire VAXVMS license plate.  Armando jokingly threatened to
> park his sports car next to my car and take a picture of the two OS license
> plates side-by-side.
>
> AT&T's "consider it a standard" campaign was pretty successful in getting
> corporate executive types thinking about UNIX.  Sort of along the lines of
> the "Intel Inside" campaign, which actually got ordinary folks to care
> about whose chip was in their PC.
>
> But AT&T never was able to take advantage of the opening the "consider it
> a standard" campaign provided.  In addition to the reasons Clem cited, I
> think AT&T simply never learned how to compete in an open market.  They had
> been a regulated utility monopoly for so very long.
>
> -Paul W.
>

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[TUHS] Re: Was the SVID A Foregone Conclusion Pre-usr group?

[Ron Natalie]

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