[TUHS] ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[TUHS] ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[segaloco via TUHS]

Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards.  C was published via the ANSI route as X3.159, whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1.  Was there every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI instead?  Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in publishers?  In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.

- Matt G.

[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Ori Idan]

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As far as I know IEEE is not really a standard, it is a recommendation,
while ANSI is a standard. ANSI is the American standard and ISO is
International.

-- 
Ori Idan CEO Helicon Books
http://www.heliconbooks.com





On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 8:56 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the rationale
> behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of UNIX and
> UNIX-adjacent standards.  C was published via the ANSI route as X3.159,
> whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1.  Was there
> every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI instead?
> Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in
> publishers?  In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the
> track to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
>
> - Matt G.
>

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Marc Rochkind]

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>
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 12:33 PM Ori Idan <ori@heliconbooks.com> wrote:
> As far as I know IEEE is not really a standard, it is a recommendation,
> while ANSI is a standard. ANSI is the American standard and ISO is
> International.


I'm not sure what you mean by "IEEE" in this sentence. (IEEE is a
professional organization.) There are numerous IEEE standards that are
definitely standards. All standards are recommendations, but sometimes
conformance is required by a government or other procuring organization or
by a development organizatrion that requires certain behavior on the part
of its programmers.

Marc

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Aron Insinga]

https://standards.ieee.org/

Think of IEEE 802.11.

- Aron


On 6/26/24 14:32, Ori Idan wrote:
> As far as I know IEEE is not really a standard, it is a 
> recommendation, while ANSI is a standard. ANSI is the American 
> standard and ISO is International.

[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Peter Yardley]

IEEE publishes standards as well.

https://standards.ieee.org/

> On 27 Jun 2024, at 4:32 AM, Ori Idan <ori@heliconbooks.com> wrote:
> 
> As far as I know IEEE is not really a standard, it is a recommendation, while ANSI is a standard. ANSI is the American standard and ISO is International.
> 
> -- 
> Ori Idan CEO Helicon Books
> http://www.heliconbooks.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 8:56 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards.  C was published via the ANSI route as X3.159, whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1.  Was there every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI instead?  Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in publishers?  In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
> 
> - Matt G.

Peter Yardley
peter.martin.yardley@gmail.com

[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Marc Rochkind]

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I think historically ANSI did languages.

But, I don't know specifically why IEEE became the standards body for
POSIX. I did participate for a while in the IEEE standards process (not
POSIX, but something else), and I knew it as a large, very active, well
managed organization, always eager to take on new things (such as the thing
that I was engaged in). So maybe that was one reason.

Maybe a greater reason is that the part of IEEE standards that did software
was chaired by a person from DEC (forgot his name). I'm sure DEC had a
strong interest in a UNIX-based standard, if only to make sure that it
didn't go completely wild and negate DEC's huge head start in selling
machines to run UNIX.

Marc

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 12:22 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the rationale
> behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of UNIX and
> UNIX-adjacent standards.  C was published via the ANSI route as X3.159,
> whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1.  Was there
> every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI instead?
> Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in
> publishers?  In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the
> track to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
>
> - Matt G.
>


-- 
*My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com <mrochkind@gmail.com>*

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[James Johnston]

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ANSI accredits US standards committees and delegates, both to US and
International Meetings.

ANSI can vote to accept a standard.   While I don't know the issue behind
POSIX, it's entirely possible that ANSI accredited IEEE to standardize
things. They have done this to many various groups for standards within
their wheelhouse.  Sometimes this has worked well, sometimes it has worked
to the interest of some particular entity, speaking as someone who has
spent one to many days hanging out in standards meetings as a "technical
expert".

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 11:35 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think historically ANSI did languages.
>
> But, I don't know specifically why IEEE became the standards body for
> POSIX. I did participate for a while in the IEEE standards process (not
> POSIX, but something else), and I knew it as a large, very active, well
> managed organization, always eager to take on new things (such as the thing
> that I was engaged in). So maybe that was one reason.
>
> Maybe a greater reason is that the part of IEEE standards that did
> software was chaired by a person from DEC (forgot his name). I'm sure DEC
> had a strong interest in a UNIX-based standard, if only to make sure that
> it didn't go completely wild and negate DEC's huge head start in selling
> machines to run UNIX.
>
> Marc
>
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 12:22 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>> Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the rationale
>> behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of UNIX and
>> UNIX-adjacent standards.  C was published via the ANSI route as X3.159,
>> whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1.  Was there
>> every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI instead?
>> Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in
>> publishers?  In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the
>> track to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
>>
>> - Matt G.
>>
>
>
> --
> *My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com <mrochkind@gmail.com>*
>


-- 
James D. (jj) Johnston

Chief Scientist, Immersion Networks

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Wednesday, June 26th, 2024 at 11:43 AM, James Johnston <audioskeptic@gmail.com> wrote:

> ANSI accredits US standards committees and delegates, both to US and International Meetings.
> ANSI can vote to accept a standard. While I don't know the issue behind POSIX, it's entirely possible that ANSI accredited IEEE to standardize things. They have done this to many various groups for standards within their wheelhouse. Sometimes this has worked well, sometimes it has worked to the interest of some particular entity, speaking as someone who has spent one to many days hanging out in standards meetings as a "technical expert".
> 
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 11:35 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > I think historically ANSI did languages.
> > But, I don't know specifically why IEEE became the standards body for POSIX. I did participate for a while in the IEEE standards process (not POSIX, but something else), and I knew it as a large, very active, well managed organization, always eager to take on new things (such as the thing that I was engaged in). So maybe that was one reason.
> > 
> > Maybe a greater reason is that the part of IEEE standards that did software was chaired by a person from DEC (forgot his name). I'm sure DEC had a strong interest in a UNIX-based standard, if only to make sure that it didn't go completely wild and negate DEC's huge head start in selling machines to run UNIX.
> > 
> > Marc
> > 
> > On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 12:22 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards. C was published via the ANSI route as X3.159, whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1. Was there every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI instead? Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in publishers? In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
> > > 
> > > - Matt G.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > --
> > My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com
> 
> 
> 
> --
> James D. (jj) Johnston
> 
> Chief Scientist, Immersion Networks

Well and that touches on one of the standards that adds some interest to this discussion: "An American National Standard IEEE Standard Pascal Computer Programming Language".  In this case, ANSI/IEEE 770 X3.97 is the Pascal standard as sponsored by both IEEE *and* ANSI.  The lines can certainly blur.  Another example of a language standard under IEEE is 1076, VHDL.  Could it be interpreted as such:

IEEE is one institute among many that may originate the creation and publication of standards in the field of electrical engineering and adjacent fields.  ANSI, in turn, is a national general standards body that publishes standards created by groups such as IEEE as well as those created relatively independently by their own committees such as X3.

In other words you're liable to have IEEE standards that get tracked as ANSI, but the likelihood of ANSI cooking something up in their own committees and then bouncing it out to IEEE is lower if present at all?

- Matt G.

P.S. If anyone wants a trial-use copy of POSIX, there's one sitting on eBay right now https://www.ebay.com/itm/145798619385

[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Heinz Lycklama]

The POSIX Standard for the UNIX System was actually
started under the umbrella of /usr/group, which was
comprised mostly of commercial companies and users
of the UNIX system. /usr/group was the forerunner
of UniForum. I chaired the /usr/group standard from
1981 to 1984, after which we turned the work over
to the IEEE, chaired by Jim Isaac and co-chaired by
myself. I worked for INTERACTIVE Systems Corp,
in Santa Monica, CA- the first commercial UNIX
company that provided for UNIX system software
on the DEC PDP11 and VAX computers, and led the
porting of the UNIX System to many different computer
architectures from micro to mainframe.

Heinz

On 6/26/2024 11:52 AM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> On Wednesday, June 26th, 2024 at 11:43 AM, James Johnston <audioskeptic@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ANSI accredits US standards committees and delegates, both to US and International Meetings.
>> ANSI can vote to accept a standard. While I don't know the issue behind POSIX, it's entirely possible that ANSI accredited IEEE to standardize things. They have done this to many various groups for standards within their wheelhouse. Sometimes this has worked well, sometimes it has worked to the interest of some particular entity, speaking as someone who has spent one to many days hanging out in standards meetings as a "technical expert".
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 11:35 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I think historically ANSI did languages.
>>> But, I don't know specifically why IEEE became the standards body for POSIX. I did participate for a while in the IEEE standards process (not POSIX, but something else), and I knew it as a large, very active, well managed organization, always eager to take on new things (such as the thing that I was engaged in). So maybe that was one reason.
>>>
>>> Maybe a greater reason is that the part of IEEE standards that did software was chaired by a person from DEC (forgot his name). I'm sure DEC had a strong interest in a UNIX-based standard, if only to make sure that it didn't go completely wild and negate DEC's huge head start in selling machines to run UNIX.
>>>
>>> Marc
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 12:22 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards. C was published via the ANSI route as X3.159, whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1. Was there every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI instead? Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in publishers? In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
>>>>
>>>> - Matt G.
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com
>>
>>
>> --
>> James D. (jj) Johnston
>>
>> Chief Scientist, Immersion Networks
> Well and that touches on one of the standards that adds some interest to this discussion: "An American National Standard IEEE Standard Pascal Computer Programming Language".  In this case, ANSI/IEEE 770 X3.97 is the Pascal standard as sponsored by both IEEE *and* ANSI.  The lines can certainly blur.  Another example of a language standard under IEEE is 1076, VHDL.  Could it be interpreted as such:
>
> IEEE is one institute among many that may originate the creation and publication of standards in the field of electrical engineering and adjacent fields.  ANSI, in turn, is a national general standards body that publishes standards created by groups such as IEEE as well as those created relatively independently by their own committees such as X3.
>
> In other words you're liable to have IEEE standards that get tracked as ANSI, but the likelihood of ANSI cooking something up in their own committees and then bouncing it out to IEEE is lower if present at all?
>
> - Matt G.
>
> P.S. If anyone wants a trial-use copy of POSIX, there's one sitting on eBay right now https://www.ebay.com/itm/145798619385

[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Charles H Sauer (he/him)]

I was waiting for Heinz to say something, assuming he would at least say 
what he did about the beginnings of POSIX.

Another IEEE standard of great historical import is IEEE 754-1985 for 
representing floating point numbers. Many of the 801 people wanted to 
preserve IBM Hexadecimal floating point introduced with System/360. One 
of my best memories of Phil Hester is his fulfilled promise that 754 
would prevail in what became the RS/6000. Charlie

On 6/26/2024 2:34 PM, Heinz Lycklama wrote:
> The POSIX Standard for the UNIX System was actually
> started under the umbrella of /usr/group, which was
> comprised mostly of commercial companies and users
> of the UNIX system. /usr/group was the forerunner
> of UniForum. I chaired the /usr/group standard from
> 1981 to 1984, after which we turned the work over
> to the IEEE, chaired by Jim Isaac and co-chaired by
> myself. I worked for INTERACTIVE Systems Corp,
> in Santa Monica, CA- the first commercial UNIX
> company that provided for UNIX system software
> on the DEC PDP11 and VAX computers, and led the
> porting of the UNIX System to many different computer
> architectures from micro to mainframe.
> 
> Heinz
> 
> On 6/26/2024 11:52 AM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
>> On Wednesday, June 26th, 2024 at 11:43 AM, James Johnston 
>> <audioskeptic@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> ANSI accredits US standards committees and delegates, both to US and 
>>> International Meetings.
>>> ANSI can vote to accept a standard. While I don't know the issue 
>>> behind POSIX, it's entirely possible that ANSI accredited IEEE to 
>>> standardize things. They have done this to many various groups for 
>>> standards within their wheelhouse. Sometimes this has worked well, 
>>> sometimes it has worked to the interest of some particular entity, 
>>> speaking as someone who has spent one to many days hanging out in 
>>> standards meetings as a "technical expert".
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 11:35 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think historically ANSI did languages.
>>>> But, I don't know specifically why IEEE became the standards body 
>>>> for POSIX. I did participate for a while in the IEEE standards 
>>>> process (not POSIX, but something else), and I knew it as a large, 
>>>> very active, well managed organization, always eager to take on new 
>>>> things (such as the thing that I was engaged in). So maybe that was 
>>>> one reason.
>>>>
>>>> Maybe a greater reason is that the part of IEEE standards that did 
>>>> software was chaired by a person from DEC (forgot his name). I'm 
>>>> sure DEC had a strong interest in a UNIX-based standard, if only to 
>>>> make sure that it didn't go completely wild and negate DEC's huge 
>>>> head start in selling machines to run UNIX.
>>>>
>>>> Marc
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 12:22 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> 
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the 
>>>>> rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the 
>>>>> publication of UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards. C was published 
>>>>> via the ANSI route as X3.159, whereas POSIX was instead published 
>>>>> by the IEEE route as 1003.1. Was there every any consideration of C 
>>>>> through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI instead? Is there an appreciable 
>>>>> difference suggested by the difference in publishers? In any case, 
>>>>> both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track to an 
>>>>> international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
>>>>>
>>>>> - Matt G.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> -- 
>>>> My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com
>>>
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> James D. (jj) Johnston
>>>
>>> Chief Scientist, Immersion Networks
>> Well and that touches on one of the standards that adds some interest 
>> to this discussion: "An American National Standard IEEE Standard 
>> Pascal Computer Programming Language".  In this case, ANSI/IEEE 770 
>> X3.97 is the Pascal standard as sponsored by both IEEE *and* ANSI.  
>> The lines can certainly blur.  Another example of a language standard 
>> under IEEE is 1076, VHDL.  Could it be interpreted as such:
>>
>> IEEE is one institute among many that may originate the creation and 
>> publication of standards in the field of electrical engineering and 
>> adjacent fields.  ANSI, in turn, is a national general standards body 
>> that publishes standards created by groups such as IEEE as well as 
>> those created relatively independently by their own committees such as 
>> X3.
>>
>> In other words you're liable to have IEEE standards that get tracked 
>> as ANSI, but the likelihood of ANSI cooking something up in their own 
>> committees and then bouncing it out to IEEE is lower if present at all?
>>
>> - Matt G.
>>
>> P.S. If anyone wants a trial-use copy of POSIX, there's one sitting on 
>> eBay right now https://www.ebay.com/itm/145798619385
> 

-- 
voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer@technologists.com
fax: +1.512.346.5240         Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

[TUHS] Re: arithmetic, Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[John Levine]

It appears that Charles H Sauer (he/him) <sauer@technologists.com> said:
>I was waiting for Heinz to say something, assuming he would at least say 
>what he did about the beginnings of POSIX.
>
>Another IEEE standard of great historical import is IEEE 754-1985 for 
>representing floating point numbers. Many of the 801 people wanted to 
>preserve IBM Hexadecimal floating point introduced with System/360. 

In view of the well known horrible numeric properities of the hex
floating point, why? Because they had so much code written to work
around it?

R's,
John

[TUHS] Re: arithmetic, Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Charles H. Sauer]

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> On Jun 26, 2024, at 9:36 PM, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
> 
> It appears that Charles H Sauer (he/him) <sauer@technologists.com> said:
>> I was waiting for Heinz to say something, assuming he would at least say 
>> what he did about the beginnings of POSIX.
>> 
>> Another IEEE standard of great historical import is IEEE 754-1985 for 
>> representing floating point numbers. Many of the 801 people wanted to 
>> preserve IBM Hexadecimal floating point introduced with System/360.
> 
> In view of the well known horrible numeric properities of the hex
> floating point, why? Because they had so much code written to work
> around it?
> 
> R's,
> John

Maybe I knew back then, but anything I say now is supposition. I suppose the same mindset that wanted to see PL.8 succeed as PL/I revisited wanted to see 801 succeed as 370 revisited. In any case, quite a few of the Yorktown people that moved to Austin to help with what became RS/6000 came with the notion HFP was the true course.

Though you were no longer involved in that time frame, IIRC, you probably had a better sense than most non-IBM people of why I said "it was more like <em>M<sub>n</sub></em> competing factions within <em>N</em> competing companies.” 

That Phil Hester was able to force 754 instead of HFP is more a credit to his political and technical skills than most non-IBM could appreciate.

Charlie

--
voice: +1.512.784.7526       e-mail: sauer@technologists.com <mailto:sauer@technologists.com>           
fax: +1.512.346.5240         web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ <http://technologists.com/sauer/>
Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/Twitter: CharlesHSauer


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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Marc Rochkind]

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Yes,  thanks Heinz, Jim Isaac is the name I was trying to remember.

The standards effort I was involved in was part of the now-forgotten (I
hope) GUI Wars, in which a bunch of workstation makers (I remember DEC, HP,
and IBM, among others) supporting an X Window System GUI toolkit called
Motif battled Sun and AT&T who pushed OpenLook. OpenLook was about 50 times
more elegant, but Motif won the day. It came from OSF, the Open Systems
Foundation, which was easily the most arrogant organization I ever dealt
with. I think they were disbanded as a result of a lawsuit involving
restraint of trade, or monopolistic behavior, or a cartel, or something
along those lines. (You could view the GUI Wars as East Coast vs. West
Coast and you might be right, except that AT&T joined the West Coast side.)

My role in all of this is that there was an IEEE effort to standardize a
GUI API based not on Motif or OpenLook, but on a cross-platform system that
I invented called XVT. The user manual, which I wrote, was the base
document. I think the Motif folks managed at one point to get their own
standards committee. I know that our effort fizzled. I don't know if there
ever was a Motif standard.

Motif, like X, was easily used by anyone who was an MIT CS grad student.
OpenLook might have been used by Sun Workstation programmers, but I don't
know if it ever appeared on any other system. My own system, XVT, wasn't so
great either and was very limited. But as a guy I worked with once at Bell
Labs on Cobol stuff said once about Cobol, "Hey, it put my kids through
college." XVT put my kids through college. (Yes, Bell Labs was programming
systems in Cobol. Those were the folks we built the Programmer's Workbench
for!)

While the GUI Wars were going on, Apple conquered the hearts and minds of
the intelligentsia, and Microsoft conquered the corporations and
government. (Progress in chips made workstations disappear as a distinct
species.) Neither Apple nor Microsoft gave a fig about Motif, OpenLook, X,
or any of that academic stuff.

Marc

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 1:35 PM Heinz Lycklama <heinz@osta.com> wrote:

> The POSIX Standard for the UNIX System was actually
> started under the umbrella of /usr/group, which was
> comprised mostly of commercial companies and users
> of the UNIX system. /usr/group was the forerunner
> of UniForum. I chaired the /usr/group standard from
> 1981 to 1984, after which we turned the work over
> to the IEEE, chaired by Jim Isaac and co-chaired by
> myself. I worked for INTERACTIVE Systems Corp,
> in Santa Monica, CA- the first commercial UNIX
> company that provided for UNIX system software
> on the DEC PDP11 and VAX computers, and led the
> porting of the UNIX System to many different computer
> architectures from micro to mainframe.
>
> Heinz
>
> On 6/26/2024 11:52 AM, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> > On Wednesday, June 26th, 2024 at 11:43 AM, James Johnston <
> audioskeptic@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> ANSI accredits US standards committees and delegates, both to US and
> International Meetings.
> >> ANSI can vote to accept a standard. While I don't know the issue behind
> POSIX, it's entirely possible that ANSI accredited IEEE to standardize
> things. They have done this to many various groups for standards within
> their wheelhouse. Sometimes this has worked well, sometimes it has worked
> to the interest of some particular entity, speaking as someone who has
> spent one to many days hanging out in standards meetings as a "technical
> expert".
> >>
> >> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 11:35 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >>> I think historically ANSI did languages.
> >>> But, I don't know specifically why IEEE became the standards body for
> POSIX. I did participate for a while in the IEEE standards process (not
> POSIX, but something else), and I knew it as a large, very active, well
> managed organization, always eager to take on new things (such as the thing
> that I was engaged in). So maybe that was one reason.
> >>>
> >>> Maybe a greater reason is that the part of IEEE standards that did
> software was chaired by a person from DEC (forgot his name). I'm sure DEC
> had a strong interest in a UNIX-based standard, if only to make sure that
> it didn't go completely wild and negate DEC's huge head start in selling
> machines to run UNIX.
> >>>
> >>> Marc
> >>>
> >>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 12:22 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the
> rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of
> UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards. C was published via the ANSI route as
> X3.159, whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1.
> Was there every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI
> instead? Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in
> publishers? In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the
> track to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
> >>>>
> >>>> - Matt G.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> James D. (jj) Johnston
> >>
> >> Chief Scientist, Immersion Networks
> > Well and that touches on one of the standards that adds some interest to
> this discussion: "An American National Standard IEEE Standard Pascal
> Computer Programming Language".  In this case, ANSI/IEEE 770 X3.97 is the
> Pascal standard as sponsored by both IEEE *and* ANSI.  The lines can
> certainly blur.  Another example of a language standard under IEEE is 1076,
> VHDL.  Could it be interpreted as such:
> >
> > IEEE is one institute among many that may originate the creation and
> publication of standards in the field of electrical engineering and
> adjacent fields.  ANSI, in turn, is a national general standards body that
> publishes standards created by groups such as IEEE as well as those created
> relatively independently by their own committees such as X3.
> >
> > In other words you're liable to have IEEE standards that get tracked as
> ANSI, but the likelihood of ANSI cooking something up in their own
> committees and then bouncing it out to IEEE is lower if present at all?
> >
> > - Matt G.
> >
> > P.S. If anyone wants a trial-use copy of POSIX, there's one sitting on
> eBay right now https://www.ebay.com/itm/145798619385
>
>

-- 
*My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com <mrochkind@gmail.com>*

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Rich Salz]

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>
>  It came from OSF, the Open Systems Foundation, which was easily the most
> arrogant organization I ever dealt with. I think they were disbanded as a
> result of a lawsuit involving restraint of trade, or monopolistic behavior,
> or a cartel, or something along those lines.
>

OSF stopped developing and shipping reference implementations of software
when it merged with X/Open to become The Open Group. Doing that (and
shutting down their Research Institute) was the price for getting Sun to
join; they didn't want other programmers competing with them. ( was
technical lead of OSF DCE at the time of the merger, and left when it
became clear there was never going to be any coding there any more.)

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Alan Coopersmith via TUHS]

On 6/26/24 13:29, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> The standards effort I was involved in was part of the now-forgotten (I hope) 
> GUI Wars, in which a bunch of workstation makers (I remember DEC, HP, and IBM, 
> among others) supporting an X Window System GUI toolkit called Motif battled Sun 
> and AT&T who pushed OpenLook. OpenLook was about 50 times more elegant, but 
> Motif won the day. It came from OSF, the Open Systems Foundation, which was 
> easily the most arrogant organization I ever dealt with. I think they were 
> disbanded as a result of a lawsuit involving restraint of trade, or monopolistic 
> behavior, or a cartel, or something along those lines.

OSF merged with X/Open to become The Open Group, though the lawsuit you mention
is described in the History section of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation .

> I think the 
> Motif folks managed at one point to get their own standards committee. I know 
> that our effort fizzled. I don't know if there ever was a Motif standard.

After the merger, Motif was included, along with CDE and the X Window System,
as part of The Open Group's "Unix 98 Workstation" standard.  Later versions
of the Unix standards dropped the GUI components altogether.

> Motif, like X, was easily used by anyone who was an MIT CS grad student. 
> OpenLook might have been used by Sun Workstation programmers, but I don't know 
> if it ever appeared on any other system.

At least the Xview library and olvm window manager were released as open source,
and were available on some early Linux distros.  Some other applications are
still available from either https://www.darwinsys.com/olcd/ or
https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM .

-- 
         -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith@oracle.com
          Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris

[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Warner Losh]

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I'll add that POSIX, as we know it today (and really since at least 2000)
is a collaboration between The Open Group, IEEE Std 1003.1-XXXX and ISO/IEC
9945:YYYY (collectively known as the Austin Group, though why "Austin" I
cannot say).

So these days, it's standardized by "both" IEEE and ANSI (in the form of
ISO, of which ANSI is effectively a member).

Warner

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 3:20 PM Alan Coopersmith via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
wrote:

> On 6/26/24 13:29, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> > The standards effort I was involved in was part of the now-forgotten (I
> hope)
> > GUI Wars, in which a bunch of workstation makers (I remember DEC, HP,
> and IBM,
> > among others) supporting an X Window System GUI toolkit called Motif
> battled Sun
> > and AT&T who pushed OpenLook. OpenLook was about 50 times more elegant,
> but
> > Motif won the day. It came from OSF, the Open Systems Foundation, which
> was
> > easily the most arrogant organization I ever dealt with. I think they
> were
> > disbanded as a result of a lawsuit involving restraint of trade, or
> monopolistic
> > behavior, or a cartel, or something along those lines.
>
> OSF merged with X/Open to become The Open Group, though the lawsuit you
> mention
> is described in the History section of
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation .
>
> > I think the
> > Motif folks managed at one point to get their own standards committee. I
> know
> > that our effort fizzled. I don't know if there ever was a Motif standard.
>
> After the merger, Motif was included, along with CDE and the X Window
> System,
> as part of The Open Group's "Unix 98 Workstation" standard.  Later versions
> of the Unix standards dropped the GUI components altogether.
>
> > Motif, like X, was easily used by anyone who was an MIT CS grad student.
> > OpenLook might have been used by Sun Workstation programmers, but I
> don't know
> > if it ever appeared on any other system.
>
> At least the Xview library and olvm window manager were released as open
> source,
> and were available on some early Linux distros.  Some other applications
> are
> still available from either https://www.darwinsys.com/olcd/ or
> https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM .
>

I'm saddened that I was never able to get Object Interface (OI) sources
released,
since it implemented both Motif and OpenLook (2d and 3d) in C++. and UIB
(User Interface Builder).
But instead we were purchased by too many companies that later just
abandoned everything.
It was my little hedge against the Unix Wars, and porting it to all the
Unixes showed me
both how close everything was, and how annoyingly different things were. I
kinda had my
own 'portability library' that I'd conditionally compile in things for the
outlier Unix systems of
the day (usually HP/UX and AIX, though IRIX was oddly both more advanced
and missing
bits).

Warner


> --
>          -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith@oracle.com
>           Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris
>
>

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Rich Salz]

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>
> I'll add that POSIX, as we know it today (and really since at least 2000)
> is a collaboration between The Open Group, IEEE Std 1003.1-XXXX and ISO/IEC
> 9945:YYYY (collectively known as the Austin Group, though why "Austin" I
> cannot say).
>

Because IBM hosted the first meeting in Austin, at their Unix development
center.  Check out the footnotes at
https://www.filibeto.org/sun/lib/standards/susv3/frontmatter/preface.html

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Warner Losh wrote in
 <CANCZdfpSPE0yhgyFch4JDUC1JW17V4pz7cZ2aGpDk+chsY93ig@mail.gmail.com>:
 |I'll add that POSIX, as we know it today (and really since at least 2000)
 |is a collaboration between The Open Group, IEEE Std 1003.1-XXXX and ISO/IEC
 |9945:YYYY (collectively known as the Austin Group, though why "Austin" I
 |cannot say).
 |
 |So these days, it's standardized by "both" IEEE and ANSI (in the form of
 |ISO, of which ANSI is effectively a member).

The explanation is part of the standard

1
  The Austin Group is named after the location of the inaugural
  meeting held at the IBM facility in Austin, Texas in September
  1998.
2
  The name POSIX was suggested by Richard Stallman. It is expected
  to be pronounced with the first two syllables as in positive,
  not poh-six, or other variations. The pronunciation has been
  published in an attempt to promulgate a standardized way of
  referring to a standard operating system interface.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Clem Cole]

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rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
comment came from.
The p1003 committee for Ieee was the portable operating system standard and
at the time adding ix was the norm.  POSIX became the term we all used to
refer to the work we doing.  Rms was not involved in any way

Clem

Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual


On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 5:53 PM Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu> wrote:

> Warner Losh wrote in
>  <CANCZdfpSPE0yhgyFch4JDUC1JW17V4pz7cZ2aGpDk+chsY93ig@mail.gmail.com>:
>  |I'll add that POSIX, as we know it today (and really since at least 2000)
>  |is a collaboration between The Open Group, IEEE Std 1003.1-XXXX and
> ISO/IEC
>  |9945:YYYY (collectively known as the Austin Group, though why "Austin" I
>  |cannot say).
>  |
>  |So these days, it's standardized by "both" IEEE and ANSI (in the form of
>  |ISO, of which ANSI is effectively a member).
>
> The explanation is part of the standard
>
> 1
>   The Austin Group is named after the location of the inaugural
>   meeting held at the IBM facility in Austin, Texas in September
>   1998.
> 2
>   The name POSIX was suggested by Richard Stallman. It is expected
>   to be pronounced with the first two syllables as in positive,
>   not poh-six, or other variations. The pronunciation has been
>   published in an attempt to promulgate a standardized way of
>   referring to a standard operating system interface.
>
> --steffen
> |
> |Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
> |der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
> |einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
> |(By Robert Gernhardt)
>

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[TUHS] Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Wednesday, 26 June 2024 at 20:44:12 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
> comment came from.

At the very least, from rms himself:
https://stallman.org/articles/posix.html
There's a reference to this page in the Wikipedia page on POSIX.

> The p1003 committee for Ieee was the portable operating system standard and
> at the time adding ix was the norm.  POSIX became the term we all used to
> refer to the work we doing.  Rms was not involved in any way

rms suggests that he was involved in the committee?  Not true?  Maybe
a different, related committee?

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php

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[TUHS] Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

[Ron Natalie]

RMS is an odiferous pedophile.
Every time I was within six feet of him I needed to go shower.



------ Original Message ------
From "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@lemis.com>
To "Clem Cole" <clemc@ccc.com>
Cc "Alan Coopersmith" <alan.coopersmith@oracle.com>; "Marc Rochkind" 
<mrochkind@gmail.com>; tuhs@tuhs.org
Date 6/26/24, 9:11:00 PM
Subject [TUHS] Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) 
Standards Body Selection)

>On Wednesday, 26 June 2024 at 20:44:12 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>>  rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
>>  comment came from.
>
>At the very least, from rms himself:
>https://stallman.org/articles/posix.html
>There's a reference to this page in the Wikipedia page on POSIX.
>
>>  The p1003 committee for Ieee was the portable operating system standard and
>>  at the time adding ix was the norm.  POSIX became the term we all used to
>>  refer to the work we doing.  Rms was not involved in any way
>
>rms suggests that he was involved in the committee?  Not true?  Maybe
>a different, related committee?
>
>Greg
>--
>Sent from my desktop computer.
>Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
>See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
>This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
>reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php

[TUHS] Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

[Warner Losh]

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On Wed, Jun 26, 2024, 8:12 PM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> RMS is an odiferous pedophile.
> Every time I was within six feet of him I needed to go shower.
>

Despit his many legit accomplishments, he likes to amplify what he's done
and take undo credit...

I've never been close enough to verify the odiferous trait...

Warner

Warner


> ------ Original Message ------
> From "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@lemis.com>
> To "Clem Cole" <clemc@ccc.com>
> Cc "Alan Coopersmith" <alan.coopersmith@oracle.com>; "Marc Rochkind"
> <mrochkind@gmail.com>; tuhs@tuhs.org
> Date 6/26/24, 9:11:00 PM
> Subject [TUHS] Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX)
> Standards Body Selection)
>
> >On Wednesday, 26 June 2024 at 20:44:12 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> >>  rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
> >>  comment came from.
> >
> >At the very least, from rms himself:
> >https://stallman.org/articles/posix.html
> >There's a reference to this page in the Wikipedia page on POSIX.
> >
> >>  The p1003 committee for Ieee was the portable operating system
> standard and
> >>  at the time adding ix was the norm.  POSIX became the term we all used
> to
> >>  refer to the work we doing.  Rms was not involved in any way
> >
> >rms suggests that he was involved in the committee?  Not true?  Maybe
> >a different, related committee?
> >
> >Greg
> >--
> >Sent from my desktop computer.
> >Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
> >See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
> >This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
> >reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php
>

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[TUHS] Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Ron Natalie wrote in
 <em7ee425bb-e915-4ac1-a350-5286a7b9c1eb@31c38f07.com>:
 |RMS is an odiferous pedophile.

I in turn must however claim that especially in the 70s and 80s
many elder men spoke out for and about pedophilism, especially in
the hippie scene, while i also think (that is myself) they did not
actually do it; but for a reflected elder man pedophilism would be
very easy (mind you, read Dostojewski, "Dämonen", for example, in
the section that was initially not allowed to be published but
came later, in the late 1910s / early 1920s, which was a real
discussion point at its time, by the way, as can be seen when
reading the wonderful childhood autobiography of the even more
wonderful Simone de Beauvoir, btw just like Richard Wagners claim
on "jews" (whatever that is) "cannot sing", .. but that is
something totally different (and i am happy the wonderful Daniel
Barenboim played Wagner in Israel about twenty years ago, with
those not-knowing fanatics going gracy .. but he stood, or the
wonderful old lady Wagner saying "for us old nazis, USA stands for
'unser seliger Adolf' (our saint brownie)", while our elder former
emperor was chopping wood, but it seems i am getting off-topic);
anyhow, Dostojewski then lets the priest say something like "some
elder men even make a play about it", aka, playing the game with
the young robot, that is to say).  *But* that is off-topic, and
maybe requires a sense of social context and understanding that
the modern times do not allow in public social discourse by far,
while at the same time the morals detoriate under the ground.  But
i was quoting "o tempora o mores" already thirty years ago, yet,
what did i know.
There is a high (!) hidden figure on the criminal case itself.

 |Every time I was within six feet of him I needed to go shower.

Just last year i stopped using a deo i was using for many years
because it is from England, because i finally stopped supporting
warmongering.  (I mean, i did have some super ecological crystals
in the very past, but i had forgotten to wash it away before
i went bicycle driving, and then there was raw meat were used to
be my axilla .. so that was that.)  The new one has no
Aluminiumhydroxychlorid, and boy, i can tell you!, i have to wash
my axillas twice or thrice a day to bypass the AHC breach.
(But then i thought i do follow Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim, a famous
science journalist born only a few kilometres away, who speaks
loud in favour of AHC-less deo (it! plugs! eggrine glants!!), as
well as context! and quality! in journalism etc, which is not less
than adorable to the maximum extend.)

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

[TUHS] Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

[Clem Cole]

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FWIW: it is possible rms sent in comments and offered thoughts that we had
to handle.  He may consider that as partition.  He might have even been at
later .2 meetings  after I stopped coming.  But he was not at any .1
meetings and the name was created during that time by Jim Isaak IIRC.

FWIW Keith Bostics was at some of the .2 meetings Keith might haven there
when we got .1 to the  stage and when started the .2 work. I was part of
all off .1 and an early draft of .2.  Keith and I wrote the proposal that
became pax after I demonstrated tpio my hack to splice a cpio front end to
tar (I never wrote car).  A few meetings later we got the first draft of .2
out and was pretty much done at that point.

So if rms joined then it’s possible but the standard was in the oven before
he might have done anything.  And since we travelled to different sites for
the meetings and he did not have a firm to cover his travel costs, I would
very surprised he was at many later ones either.

Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual


On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 10:46 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> Garbage.  Rms was never at any early IEEE meeting that I was at - you
> could smell him a mile away as he rarely bathed.  I certainly knew him in
> those days.  I also have an early draft with all participants named and he
> is not one of them!!
>
> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 9:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday, 26 June 2024 at 20:44:12 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>> > rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
>> > comment came from.
>>
>> At the very least, from rms himself:
>> https://stallman.org/articles/posix.html
>> There's a reference to this page in the Wikipedia page on POSIX.
>>
>> > The p1003 committee for Ieee was the portable operating system standard
>> and
>> > at the time adding ix was the norm.  POSIX became the term we all used
>> to
>> > refer to the work we doing.  Rms was not involved in any way
>>
>> rms suggests that he was involved in the committee?  Not true?  Maybe
>> a different, related committee?
>>
>> Greg
>> --
>> Sent from my desktop computer.
>> Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
>> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
>> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
>> reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php
>>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

[Clem Cole]

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Autocorrect. Sigh. Participation.

Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual


On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 11:02 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> FWIW: it is possible rms sent in comments and offered thoughts that we had
> to handle.  He may consider that as partition.  He might have even been at
> later .2 meetings  after I stopped coming.  But he was not at any .1
> meetings and the name was created during that time by Jim Isaak IIRC.
>
> FWIW Keith Bostics was at some of the .2 meetings Keith might haven there
> when we got .1 to the  stage and when started the .2 work. I was part of
> all off .1 and an early draft of .2.  Keith and I wrote the proposal that
> became pax after I demonstrated tpio my hack to splice a cpio front end to
> tar (I never wrote car).  A few meetings later we got the first draft of .2
> out and was pretty much done at that point.
>
> So if rms joined then it’s possible but the standard was in the oven
> before he might have done anything.  And since we travelled to different
> sites for the meetings and he did not have a firm to cover his travel
> costs, I would very surprised he was at many later ones either.
>
>
> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 10:46 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> Garbage.  Rms was never at any early IEEE meeting that I was at - you
>> could smell him a mile away as he rarely bathed.  I certainly knew him in
>> those days.  I also have an early draft with all participants named and he
>> is not one of them!!
>>
>> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 9:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wednesday, 26 June 2024 at 20:44:12 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>>> > rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
>>> > comment came from.
>>>
>>> At the very least, from rms himself:
>>> https://stallman.org/articles/posix.html
>>> There's a reference to this page in the Wikipedia page on POSIX.
>>>
>>> > The p1003 committee for Ieee was the portable operating system
>>> standard and
>>> > at the time adding ix was the norm.  POSIX became the term we all used
>>> to
>>> > refer to the work we doing.  Rms was not involved in any way
>>>
>>> rms suggests that he was involved in the committee?  Not true?  Maybe
>>> a different, related committee?
>>>
>>> Greg
>>> --
>>> Sent from my desktop computer.
>>> Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
>>> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
>>> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
>>> reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php
>>>
>>

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[TUHS] Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

[Clem Cole]

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One other thought.  Given the formal process that IEEE required us to use
for proposals and making additions/corrections - really have a hard time
imagining rms being willing to have put up with those processes or frankly
the rest of the committee putting up with him in general.  It takes a
special type of person that can compromise to be a part of a group like
that.  Rms is not cut out of that cloth.

Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual


On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 11:02 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> FWIW: it is possible rms sent in comments and offered thoughts that we had
> to handle.  He may consider that as partition.  He might have even been at
> later .2 meetings  after I stopped coming.  But he was not at any .1
> meetings and the name was created during that time by Jim Isaak IIRC.
>
> FWIW Keith Bostics was at some of the .2 meetings Keith might haven there
> when we got .1 to the  stage and when started the .2 work. I was part of
> all off .1 and an early draft of .2.  Keith and I wrote the proposal that
> became pax after I demonstrated tpio my hack to splice a cpio front end to
> tar (I never wrote car).  A few meetings later we got the first draft of .2
> out and was pretty much done at that point.
>
> So if rms joined then it’s possible but the standard was in the oven
> before he might have done anything.  And since we travelled to different
> sites for the meetings and he did not have a firm to cover his travel
> costs, I would very surprised he was at many later ones either.
>
>
> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 10:46 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> Garbage.  Rms was never at any early IEEE meeting that I was at - you
>> could smell him a mile away as he rarely bathed.  I certainly knew him in
>> those days.  I also have an early draft with all participants named and he
>> is not one of them!!
>>
>> Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 9:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wednesday, 26 June 2024 at 20:44:12 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>>> > rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
>>> > comment came from.
>>>
>>> At the very least, from rms himself:
>>> https://stallman.org/articles/posix.html
>>> There's a reference to this page in the Wikipedia page on POSIX.
>>>
>>> > The p1003 committee for Ieee was the portable operating system
>>> standard and
>>> > at the time adding ix was the norm.  POSIX became the term we all used
>>> to
>>> > refer to the work we doing.  Rms was not involved in any way
>>>
>>> rms suggests that he was involved in the committee?  Not true?  Maybe
>>> a different, related committee?
>>>
>>> Greg
>>> --
>>> Sent from my desktop computer.
>>> Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
>>> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
>>> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
>>> reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php
>>>
>>

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[TUHS] Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

[Eric E. Bowles via TUHS]

Just another reference, this one from the Open Group:

https://www.opengroup.org/austin/papers/posix_faq.html

    POSIX™ 1003.1 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ Version 1.18)

    Q0. What is POSIX? What is POSIX.1?

    [...] The name POSIX was suggested by Richard Stallman. It is expected to be pronounced pahz-icks, 
    as in positive, not poh-six, or other variations.

--eric

> On Jun 27, 2024, at 10:11, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wednesday, 26 June 2024 at 20:44:12 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>> rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
>> comment came from.
> 
> At the very least, from rms himself:
> https://stallman.org/articles/posix.html
> There's a reference to this page in the Wikipedia page on POSIX.
> 
>> The p1003 committee for Ieee was the portable operating system standard and
>> at the time adding ix was the norm.  POSIX became the term we all used to
>> refer to the work we doing.  Rms was not involved in any way
> 
> rms suggests that he was involved in the committee?  Not true?  Maybe
> a different, related committee?
> 
> Greg
> --
> Sent from my desktop computer.
> Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
> This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
> reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php

[TUHS] Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

[John S Quarterman]

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I don't recall rms being involved, certainly not in the name. -jsq

On Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 4:21 AM Eric E. Bowles via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> Just another reference, this one from the Open Group:
>
> https://www.opengroup.org/austin/papers/posix_faq.html
>
>     POSIX™ 1003.1 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ Version 1.18)
>
>     Q0. What is POSIX? What is POSIX.1?
>
>     [...] The name POSIX was suggested by Richard Stallman. It is expected
> to be pronounced pahz-icks,
>     as in positive, not poh-six, or other variations.
>
> --eric
>
> > On Jun 27, 2024, at 10:11, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wednesday, 26 June 2024 at 20:44:12 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> >> rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
> >> comment came from.
> >
> > At the very least, from rms himself:
> > https://stallman.org/articles/posix.html
> > There's a reference to this page in the Wikipedia page on POSIX.
> >
> >> The p1003 committee for Ieee was the portable operating system standard
> and
> >> at the time adding ix was the norm.  POSIX became the term we all used
> to
> >> refer to the work we doing.  Rms was not involved in any way
> >
> > rms suggests that he was involved in the committee?  Not true?  Maybe
> > a different, related committee?
> >
> > Greg
> > --
> > Sent from my desktop computer.
> > Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key.
> > See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
> > This message is digitally signed.  If your Microsoft mail program
> > reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA.php
>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

[John S Quarterman]

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Or like rms claimed Linux as part of GNU, he claimed POSIX and some people
believed him. -jsq

On Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 9:38 AM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 6:15 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jun 27, 2024 at 8:12 AM John S Quarterman <jsqmobile@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > I don't recall rms being involved, certainly not in the name. -jsq
>>
>> quip: Like childbirth, perhaps the unpleasant memory was simply blocked
>> out?
>>
>
> Is it possible that RMS suggested it as maybe an obvious quip to a
> committee member who later credited him with that since that conversation
> happened before that person heard it from others on the committee? Tricky
> to know from this distance in time.
>
> Warner
>
>         - Dan C.
>>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

[Dan Cross]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 9:47 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, 26 June 2024 at 20:44:12 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> > rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
> > comment came from.
>
> At the very least, from rms himself:
> https://stallman.org/articles/posix.html
> There's a reference to this page in the Wikipedia page on POSIX.
>
> > The p1003 committee for Ieee was the portable operating system standard and
> > at the time adding ix was the norm.  POSIX became the term we all used to
> > refer to the work we doing.  Rms was not involved in any way
>
> rms suggests that he was involved in the committee?  Not true?  Maybe
> a different, related committee?

A way to verify this would be to look for attendee lists from early
POSIX meetings, though I'm having trouble locating them. My initial
search turned up this document, a 1995 retrospective from Hal
Jespersen, where he credits Stallman for coining the name "POSIX":
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/210308.210313.

Still, that's not a primary source, and it's mentioned only in
passing. I trust Clem's recollection more.

Incidentally, and relevant to an earlier question, "why go through
IEEE for the standard?" that's addressed in Jespersen's reminiscence.

        - Dan C.

[TUHS] Re: Origin of the name POSIX (was: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection)

[Clem Cole]

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On Thu, Jun 27, 2024 at 7:59 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> A way to verify this would be to look for attendee lists from early
> POSIX meetings, though I'm having trouble locating them.


I was the original editor (more in a minute), and I believe I have an early
draft on my Masscomp machine, which is currently not powered up.
I'll try to add it to my to-do list to bring this online. The first section
has an attendee list.

I also have (in a box in my attic) some of the original handouts, including
minutes.  That is already on my to-do list.



> My initial search turned up this document, a 1995 retrospective from Hal
> Jespersen, where he credits Stallman for coining the name "POSIX":
> https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/210308.210313.
>
 I just read it. Much is correct, but that document has numerous errors,
including the transition from /usr/group to IEEE (which Heinz and I were
involved in - Hal was not). I'll send a number of updates/corrections later.
For instance, the C standard was not related to the UNIX standard and was
not originally championed by /usr/group - but rather the PC-based folks.

Remember, this document came about before the age of laptops. We made
changes and suggestions during the meetings. The /usr/group document was
edited offline after the meetings (Heinz may remember who did that work).
We started the same process by the time we transitioned to IEEE.  Since the
meetings were originally held currently with a /usr/group // UNIForum or
USENIX event, they were always near one of the Masscomp field offices.  I
told Jim that I could (and did) arrange for a loaner  Masscomp system with
a number of Wyse-60 terminals to be there for our meeting.

By the way, Jim was worried that all documents were following the IEEE
rules of being numbered and correctly indexed. But by editing at the
meeting and starting with the /usr/group document, we did turn it into an
IEEE-style draft in under two years.  As a result, I ended up as the
defacto editor for the first few drafts.  As I said, I believe I have an
early copy (in troff, of course) on my Masscomp box.

Clem
ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: Origin of the name POSIX

[Heinz Lycklama]

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We had just a little more than 60 people involved in
the /usr/group effort, with David Buck, Don Kretsch
and Eric Petersen as co-editors. The IEEE POSIX
POSIX standards effort had hundreds of participants.
But we did have all of the major companies involved
in the UNIX market participating.

Heinz

On 6/27/2024 7:34 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 27, 2024 at 7:59 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>     A way to verify this would be to look for attendee lists from early
>     POSIX meetings, though I'm having trouble locating them. 
>
>
> I was the original editor (more in a minute), and I believe I have an 
> early draft on my Masscomp machine, which is currently not powered up.
> I'll try to add it to my to-do list to bring this online. The first 
> section has an attendee list.
>
> I also have (in a box in my attic) some of the original handouts, 
> including minutes.  That is already on my to-do list.
>
>     My initialsearch turned up this document, a 1995 retrospective
>     from Hal
>     Jespersen, where he credits Stallman for coining the name "POSIX":
>     https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/210308.210313.
>
>  I just read it. Much is correct, but that document has numerous 
> errors, including the transition from /usr/group to IEEE (which Heinz 
> and I were involved in - Hal was not). I'll send a number of 
> updates/corrections later.For instance, the C standard was not related 
> to the UNIX standard and was not originally championed by /usr/group - 
> but rather the PC-based folks.
>
> Remember, this document came about before the age of laptops. We made 
> changes and suggestions during the meetings. The /usr/group document 
> was edited offlineafter the meetings (Heinz may remember who did that 
> work).  We started the same process by the time we transitioned to 
> IEEE.  Since the meetings were originally held currently with a 
> /usr/group // UNIForum or USENIX event, they were always near one of 
> the Masscomp field offices.  I told Jim that I could (and did) arrange 
> for a loaner Masscomp system with a number of Wyse-60 terminals to be 
> there for our meeting.
>
> By the way, Jim was worried that all documents were following the IEEE 
> rules of being numbered and correctly indexed. But by editing at the 
> meeting and starting with the /usr/group document, we did turn it into 
> an IEEE-style draft in under two years.  As a result, I ended up as 
> the defacto editor for the first few drafts.  As I said, I believe I 
> have an early copy (in troff, of course) on my Masscomp box.
>
> Clem
> ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Clem Cole wrote in
 <CAC20D2OP0=WbCydQj8g4VafRkn6ZwK-Wf9k0GAK0nLHXP295RA@mail.gmail.com>:
 |rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
 |comment came from.

This is from the POSIX standard itself, its "Introduction"al
clause to be exact, which claims, though,

  This introduction is not part of IEEE Std 1003.1™-2024, IEEE
  Standard for Information Technology—Portable Operating System
  Interface (POSIX™)—Base Specifications, Issue 8.

 |The p1003 committee for Ieee was the portable operating system standard and
 |at the time adding ix was the norm.  POSIX became the term we all used to
 |refer to the work we doing.  Rms was not involved in any way
 |
 |Clem

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Chet Ramey via TUHS]

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On 6/26/24 8:44 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that 
> comment came from.

http://www.opengroup.org/austin/papers/posix_faq.html

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/


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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Andy Kosela]

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On Thursday, June 27, 2024, Chet Ramey via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> On 6/26/24 8:44 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>> rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
>> comment came from.
>>
>
> http://www.opengroup.org/austin/papers/posix_faq.html
>
>
>
Richard confirms it on his own website, too.

 https://www.stallman.org/articles/posix.html

--Andy

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Clem Cole]

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Boy, I hate people rewriting history. As someone who lived it, it is just
not the case. I do not doubt that rms will try to take credit, but I think
a few of us there should send notes to Open Group.


FYI: Jim Issak was a marketing guy from Charles River Data Systems, which
is abbreviated C-R-D-S, and the firm always spelled out the letters. But
the rest of us pronounced it CRuDS—adding an "u" and pronouncing it—which I
was referred to in my first email.

When the P1003 committee was established, Jim was aware of the naming
issue, particularly after the CRDS experience.  There was a great argument
in one of the early meetings about whether it should just be a "*Portable
Operating System*" as opposed to a "*Portable Operating System Interface*."
The concern was that we were starting with the System Call API or interface
[which we had inherited from /usr/group) but planned from the beginning
(even in /usr/group days) to be more than the system call API. As I said,
we started with the System API as that would be hard enough to find common
ground -- remember DEC, in particular, was pushing for VMS-like stuff (case
folding in file names).  As you can see, we agree to use an add interface.


Hal's comment about it being called IEEEIX is strange. I do not remember it
ever being called that, and as an editor, I can say that I have no memories
of using that term. Could someone at IEEE in NYC try to call it the same? I
did not hear it or remember any document that used it, so I do not know
what he is talking about. It was not something I generated, and to have
done that would have taken edits.

I wonder if Open Group has the full SCCS files.  I kept it in SCCS
originally and generated some of the documentation Jim needed for IEEE with
SCCS commands.
ᐧ
ᐧ
ᐧ

On Thu, Jun 27, 2024 at 10:29 AM Andy Kosela <akosela@andykosela.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thursday, June 27, 2024, Chet Ramey via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>> On 6/26/24 8:44 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
>>
>>> rms had nothing to do with the name posix.  I have no idea where that
>>> comment came from.
>>>
>>
>> http://www.opengroup.org/austin/papers/posix_faq.html
>>
>>
>>
> Richard confirms it on his own website, too.
>
>  https://www.stallman.org/articles/posix.html
>
> --Andy
>

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Wesley Parish]

On 27/06/24 09:20, Alan Coopersmith via TUHS wrote:
> On 6/26/24 13:29, Marc Rochkind wrote:
>> The standards effort I was involved in was part of the now-forgotten 
>> (I hope) GUI Wars, in which a bunch of workstation makers (I remember 
>> DEC, HP, and IBM, among others) supporting an X Window System GUI 
>> toolkit called Motif battled Sun and AT&T who pushed OpenLook. 
>> OpenLook was about 50 times more elegant, but Motif won the day. It 
>> came from OSF, the Open Systems Foundation, which was easily the most 
>> arrogant organization I ever dealt with. I think they were disbanded 
>> as a result of a lawsuit involving restraint of trade, or 
>> monopolistic behavior, or a cartel, or something along those lines.
>
> OSF merged with X/Open to become The Open Group, though the lawsuit 
> you mention
> is described in the History section of
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation .
>
>> I think the Motif folks managed at one point to get their own 
>> standards committee. I know that our effort fizzled. I don't know if 
>> there ever was a Motif standard.
>
> After the merger, Motif was included, along with CDE and the X Window 
> System,
> as part of The Open Group's "Unix 98 Workstation" standard.  Later 
> versions
> of the Unix standards dropped the GUI components altogether.
>
>> Motif, like X, was easily used by anyone who was an MIT CS grad 
>> student. OpenLook might have been used by Sun Workstation 
>> programmers, but I don't know if it ever appeared on any other system.
>
> At least the Xview library and olvm window manager were released as 
> open source,
> and were available on some early Linux distros.  Some other 
> applications are
> still available from either https://www.darwinsys.com/olcd/ or
> https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM .
>
I know. I attempted to use olvm on a 4MB 486, back in 1998 iirc. It was 
not a success.

Wesley Parish

[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2024-06-27T16:27, Alan Coopersmith via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
> After the merger, Motif was included, along with CDE and the X Window
> System, as part of The Open Group's "Unix 98 Workstation" standard.
> Later versions of the Unix standards dropped the GUI components
> altogether.
>
> > Motif, like X, was easily used by anyone who was an MIT CS grad
> > student.  OpenLook might have been used by Sun Workstation
> > programmers, but I don't know if it ever appeared on any other
> > system.
>
> At least the Xview library and olvm window manager were released as
> open source, and were available on some early Linux distros.  Some
> other applications are still available from either
> https://www.darwinsys.com/olcd/ or
> https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM .

I am curious to know if OLIT and/or MoOLIT ever escaped in source form.

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Aron Insinga]

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It's an issue of where the people who want a standard think they will 
have the support to create a standard using a process they are 
comfortable with.  Yes, the standards for many languages, not to mention 
the original ASCII character set, were developed under ANSI.  But look 
at JavaScript I mean ECMAScript done under the auspices of ECMA.  Sun 
started to create a Java standard under ISO/IEC but changed their mind 
and switched to their own Java Community Process.  The National 
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (formerly the National 
Bureau of Standards) publishes standards for some things of interest to 
the US Government -- Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS).  
In most cases the work is done by volunteers, often with the support of 
their employers if they aren't an independent consultant or whatever.  
The accrediting organization provides the process and some 
administrative overhead.  I don't know about now, but ANSI sold copies 
of their standards to help support themselves.

And standards are used as competitive weapons by companies.  If Company 
A convinces the committee that their language features are better than 
company B's, and A's are written into the standard, then A is 
standard-compliant (with respect to those features) from the get-go, 
while B will have some work to do which may affect their customer base.  
Generally, I believe that people want to get a standard which will give 
them a programming language (& library) that they want to use, so there 
is a common goal in sight.  Traditionally standards were adopted from 
existing practice, and sometimes this can mean that the process is 
relatively quick.  (I think the original COBOL standard was taken from a 
manufacturer's language reference manual by Grace Hopper. ISOLatin-1 was 
a small change to the DEC Multinational Character Set.) Sometimes a 
committee starts reinventing things and it can take a while.  Whether or 
not it actually finds users depends on how well the committee did their 
job, and what the vendors and their customers decide.  (Dare I mention 
BASIC?)

Remember that standards also cover many other things like the SAE 
standards for bolts.

- Aron (a member of X3J16 [C++] for 2 years)


>     On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 12:22 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
>     wrote:
>
>         Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the
>         rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the
>         publication of UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards.  C was
>         published via the ANSI route as X3.159, whereas POSIX was
>         instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1.  Was there
>         every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through
>         ANSI instead?  Is there an appreciable difference suggested by
>         the difference in publishers?  In any case, both saw
>         subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track to an
>         international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
>
>         - Matt G.
>

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Nevin Liber]

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On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 2:57 PM Aron Insinga <aki@insinga.com> wrote:

> - Aron (a member of X3J16 [C++] for 2 years)
>

I got to say, it's fun reading about the history of standardizing
programming languages while in the middle of attending an ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC
22/WG 21 "C++" meeting...
 Nevin
-- 
 Nevin ":-)" Liber  <mailto:nl <nevin@eviloverlord.com>iber@gmail.com>

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Stuff Received]

On 2024-06-26 14:35, Marc Rochkind wrote (in part):
> I think historically ANSI did languages.

Once upon a time, ANSI even had conformance testing (though that is not 
really relevant to this thread #6-).

S.

[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[James Johnston]

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Strictly speaking ANSI would assign a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) who
would assign or create a Subcommittee, who would would then create a
working group responsible for conformance testing.

Don't ask why I know all this.

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 3:32 PM Stuff Received <stuff@riddermarkfarm.ca>
wrote:

> On 2024-06-26 14:35, Marc Rochkind wrote (in part):
> > I think historically ANSI did languages.
>
> Once upon a time, ANSI even had conformance testing (though that is not
> really relevant to this thread #6-).
>
> S.
>


-- 
James D. (jj) Johnston

Chief Scientist, Immersion Networks

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Clem Cole]

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Note: I am a founding and voting member of both the original /usr/group,
IEEE P1003 (a.k.a. POSIX), and a commenter for ANSI X3.159-1989 (*a.k.a.*
C89). Heinz Lyclama who is also on this list, was chair of the former and
also a founder of P1003.

Below are, of course, my opinions and my memory of times.  Heinz please add
color/corrections as appropriate.

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 1:56 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the rationale
> behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of UNIX and
> UNIX-adjacent standards.  C was published via the ANSI route as X3.159,
> whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1.

Different groups and functions. More in a minute.



>   Was there every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through
> ANSI instead?

Not really; each>>generally<< had a role that the other did not, although
those lines can and have blurred.



> Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in
> publishers?

Yes -- again, more shortly.



> In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track to an
> international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
>
Right, but you are ahead of yourself.

Per Wikipedia:

ANSI was most likely formed in 1918, when five engineering societies and
three government agencies founded the American Engineering Standards
Committee (AESC).[8] In 1928, the AESC became the American Standards
Association (ASA). In 1966, the ASA was reorganized and became United
States of America Standards Institute (USASI). The present name was adopted
in 1969.


Prior to 1918, these five founding engineering societies:


   - American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE, now IEEE)
   - American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
   - American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
   - American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME, now American Institute
   of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers)
   - American Society for Testing and Materials (now ASTM International)
   had been members of the United Engineering Society (UES).

Leaving out a >>lot<< of detail, but under ASA was their directive:
the *Accredited
Standards Committee X3 *
This means that the US government, particularly the US War Department (late
DoD), would accept their recommendations. However, a published set of rules
for how standards would be created, agreed upon, *etc*., for the USA became
established.

One of their early roles was creating standards for the computer industry,
such as what would become ASCII,* a.k.a.*, ASA X3.4-1963, and ASA X3/INCITS
40-1966 - 9-track mag tape.

One of the things the folks at X3 had started working on we standards that
allowed program* interchange* between different manufacturers, although
allowing manufacturers to be independent and add their own features but
keep a core that a programmer could rely upon.   So, their purvey included
creating standards for FORTRAN, Algol, Cobol, and later C.  They also
developed test suites for many of their standards and offered services to
firms like computer manufacturers to certify that their products meet the
standard. Thus, a program that worked when compiled under different
manufacturer compilers could be written.

Note that AIEE/IEEE was a founding member of ASA, but it eventually became
an accredited standards body independent of ASA/ANSI.  The subtle
difference was the idea of "sameness," which said this is functionally the
same as something else made by two different electrical manufacturers and,
as a result, could interoperate between them.   This was important to the
US DoD because they wanted more than one place to get similar products, at
least ones that could play well together.   So, they became where things
like networking, power, *etc.*, were defined and agreed upon. Of note,
independent of IEEE, we were testing groups, but if you made an error, it
was basically self-correcting -- people stopped using your product when it
was discovered you could not handle back-back ethernet packets at full
speed.

So what happened...

We graduated a bunch of young engineers of my generation who know C and
UNIX.  AT&T has made the sources to both technologies "open" and
freely available (libre as opposed to beer).  We take the knowledge with
us, and they both start to be cloned.  Since the microprocessor came in
vogue around the same time, retargeting the C compiler at many places like
Universities made sense - I did it (poorly) for the Dennis' compiler for
what would become the 68000 @Tektronix in the summer of 1979. But if you
look at the USENIX tapes from those times, you will see many different
developer tools for those processors.    However, since the AT&T tools were
licensed, several implementations grew that were mostly, if not 100%, clean
of any AT&T's IP.

Since there was no standard for the language itself, and the processors
were not PDP-11, many differences crept into the different compiler
implementations. The biggest was support for the x86 and target platforms
such as CP/M and DOS, which did not store files in the same format as UNIX
and differentiated between text files and binaries like earlier
12/18/36-bit systems from DEC had.

In the early 1980s, a group of compiler firms, originally from the PC
business, applied to set up and create the ANSI X3.159 committee.  [Thank
the Lord, Dennis agreed to join it too, as he could rein in several of the
worst proposals like near/far pointers, although the terrible text file
support leaked].  It was a very slow process since a standard did not come
about a vote until 1989 and was agreed upon until 1990.

Meanwhile, in UNIX land there, USENIX had started [see my paper: C.T. Cole,
UNIX: *A View from the Field as We Played the Game*, October 19, 2017, Le
CNam – Laboratoire, Paris France], but that was primarily an academic
organization.  Firms like manufacturers DEC, HP, Tektronix, and IBM, as
well as ISVs such as Heinz's Interactive System Corporation and Microsoft,
needed an organization that focused more on their needs as commercial
ventures.  /usr/group (which was later re-branded as Uniforum) was created.
For many reasons (many of which have been discussed here), the
manufacturer's versions of UNIX had begun to differ.  But they had a common
language C, since many, if not most, used AT&T licensed C compilers, the
compilers' input syntax was already mostly common, but one of the things
that this group realized was it was still "work" for an ISV to move their
UNIX based application between systems and they needed something more than
just a language standard.

To address this need /usr/group, formed a standard committee under Heinz's
leadership.  In 1985, we published the first UNIX standard.   One of the
members of the group, Jim Issak, who then was from another small
manufacturer building a system with a UNIX-like OS, Charles River Data
Systems (CRDS - BTW: pronounce that and smile -- marketing people are
wonderful),  realized that a /usr/group created standard was helpful to us
in the USA marketplace since /usr/group was not accredited and thus our
work would not be useful to be sent to the US Gov much less and alter
International standards body such as ECMA or ISO.

BTW: since our OS's were already getting different beyond the system call
layer, we decided to start with just the system call API which was mostly
common, plus agree to an interface standard to exchange magnetic media. But
this is where things like the file <unistd.h> come from to help make the
differences contained in a manner that a recompile allowed code to move
from one vendor's system to another.

By the early 1980 my former colleague, Maurice Graubie from Tektronix, had
been the chair of the IEEE 802 committee, which had published its set of
standards.  BTW the number.X stuff raised huge hackles at IEEE at the
time.  It had never been done. Maurice had come up with solution as a way
to keep the 801 standard together when it was beginning to diverge and fall
apart with the Ethernet folks on one side and the IBM token ring folks on
the other.

Since the OS was similar to other electrical standards, allowing one
manufacturer to build something the US government buys and knowing they
could get something similar from someone else, Maurice introduced Jim to
the folks at IEEE. Jim succeeded in putting together all of the paperwork,
getting the proper sponsorship from IEEE institutional members, and forming
a committee to create IEEE Proposal 1003.

As the next /usr/group meeting approached, we were already starting to work
on a revision. Jim explained the formal IEEE process. We officially voted
to disband that meeting and reconvene as IEEE P1003, where Heinz graciously
handed the gavel to Jim.  It also set us back a bit because the /usr/group
document was not in a form that IEEE could accept.  So the first task was
the rewrite (and use their voting process) to have it accepted. But because
of Maurice's great compromise for the 802 committee, we started by saying
this would be the first of N standards,* i.e*., 1003.1 for the system
calls, and we would (like 802) create later standards for things like the
commands.  I know that both Maurice and Jim had a little pushback by IEEE
NYC, but I am thankful that a good idea prevailed.

It's possible ANSI might able to do the same thing that IEEE did.  But the
difference is that members of the/usr/group were all institutional members
of IEEE, and the style of things we needed to do at the time was really the
sort of thing IEEE was already accustomed to doing.  As for the language,
since ASA/ANSI was already doing things there - that made sense.

BTW: it has been observed that IEEE is behind VHDL - which is a hardware
description language.   But against this more in their world -- it pushed
to silicon manufacturers, so you know IP can be moved between different
fabs.   We can argue that it's a language, and ANSI would have been a good
place for it.

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[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Heinz Lycklama]

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Clem, you have a good memory of the early days of the
UNIX standards. Here is the set that I was involved with:
     1. The /usr/group Proposed Standard published in January 1984
     2. The /usr/group Standard published in November 1984
     3. IEEE Trial Use Standard for POSIX published in April 1986
     4. IEEE POSIX Standard P1003.1 published in August 1988

Heinz

On 6/26/2024 1:32 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Note: I am a founding and voting member of both the original 
> /usr/group, IEEE P1003 (a.k.a. POSIX), and a commenter for ANSI 
> X3.159-1989 (/a.k.a./ C89). Heinz Lycklama who is also on this list, 
> was chair of the former and also a founder of P1003.
>
> Below are, of course, my opinions and my memory of times.  Heinz 
> please add color/corrections as appropriate.
>
> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 1:56 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>     Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the
>     rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the
>     publication of UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards.  C was published
>     via the ANSI route as X3.159, whereas POSIX was instead published
>     by the IEEE route as 1003.1.
>
> Different groups and functions. More in a minute.
>
>     Was there every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX
>     through ANSI instead? 
>
> Not really; each>>generally<< had a role that the other did not, 
> although those lines can and have blurred.
>
>     Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in
>     publishers? 
>
> Yes -- again, more shortly.
>
>     In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the track
>     to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations.
>
> Right, but you are ahead of yourself.
>
> Per Wikipedia:
>
>     ANSI was most likely formed in 1918, when five engineering
>     societies and three government agencies founded the American
>     Engineering Standards Committee (AESC).[8] In 1928, the AESC
>     became the American Standards Association (ASA). In 1966, the ASA
>     was reorganized and became United States of America Standards
>     Institute (USASI). The present name was adopted in 1969.
>
>
>     Prior to 1918, these five founding engineering societies:
>
>       * American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE, now IEEE)
>       * American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
>       * American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
>       * American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME, now American
>         Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers)
>       * American Society for Testing and Materials (now ASTM
>         International) had been members of the United Engineering
>         Society (UES).
>
> Leaving out a >>lot<< of detail, but under ASA was their directive: 
> the /*Accredited Standards Committee X3 */
> This means that the US government, particularly the US War Department 
> (late DoD), would accept their recommendations. However, a published 
> set of rules for how standards would be created, agreed upon, /etc/., 
> for the USA became established.
>
> One of their early roles was creating standards for the computer 
> industry, such as what would become ASCII,/a.k.a./, ASA X3.4-1963, and 
> ASA X3/INCITS 40-1966 - 9-track mag tape.
>
> One of the things the folks at X3 had started working on we standards 
> that allowed program/interchange/ between different manufacturers, 
> although allowing manufacturers to be independent and add their own 
> features but keep a core that a programmer could rely upon.   So, 
> their purvey included creating standards for FORTRAN, Algol, Cobol, 
> and later C.  They also developed test suites for many of their 
> standards and offered services to firms like computer manufacturers to 
> certify that their products meet the standard. Thus, a program that 
> worked when compiled under different manufacturer compilers could be 
> written.
>
> Note that AIEE/IEEE was a founding member of ASA, but it eventually 
> became an accredited standards body independent of ASA/ANSI.  The 
> subtle difference was the idea of "sameness," which said this is 
> functionally the same as something else made by two different 
> electrical manufacturers and, as a result, could interoperate between 
> them.   This was important to the US DoD because they wanted more than 
> one place to get similar products, at least ones that could play well 
> together.  So, they became where things like networking, power, 
> /etc./, were defined and agreed upon. Of note, independent of IEEE, we 
> were testing groups, but if you made an error, it was basically 
> self-correcting -- people stopped using your product when it was 
> discovered you could not handle back-back ethernet packets at full speed.
>
> So what happened...
>
> We graduated a bunch of young engineers of my generation who know C 
> and UNIX.  AT&T has made the sources to both technologies "open" and 
> freely available (libre as opposed to beer).  We take the knowledge 
> with us, and they both start to be cloned.  Since the microprocessor 
> came in vogue around the same time, retargeting the C compiler at many 
> places like Universities made sense - I did it (poorly) for the 
> Dennis' compiler for what would become the 68000 @Tektronix in the 
> summer of 1979. But if you look at the USENIX tapes from those times, 
> you will see many different developer tools for those processors.    
> However, since the AT&T tools were licensed, several implementations 
> grew that were mostly, if not 100%, clean of any AT&T's IP.
>
> Since there was no standard for the language itself, and the 
> processors were not PDP-11, many differences crept into the different 
> compiler implementations. The biggest was support for the x86 and 
> target platforms such as CP/M and DOS, which did not store files in 
> the same format as UNIX and differentiated between text files and 
> binaries like earlier 12/18/36-bit systems from DEC had.
>
> In the early 1980s, a group of compiler firms, originally from the PC 
> business, applied to set up and create the ANSI X3.159 committee.  
> [Thank the Lord, Dennis agreed to join it too, as he could rein in 
> several of the worst proposals like near/far pointers, although the 
> terrible text file support leaked].  It was a very slow process since 
> a standard did not come about a vote until 1989 and was agreed upon 
> until 1990.
>
> Meanwhile, in UNIX land there, USENIX had started [see my paper: C.T. 
> Cole, UNIX: /A View from the Field as We Played the Game/, October 19, 
> 2017, Le CNam – Laboratoire, Paris France], but that was primarily an 
> academic organization.  Firms like manufacturers DEC, HP, Tektronix, 
> and IBM, as well as ISVs such as Heinz's Interactive System 
> Corporation and Microsoft, needed an organization that focused more on 
> their needs as commercial ventures.  /usr/group (which was later 
> re-branded as Uniforum) was created. For many reasons (many of which 
> have been discussed here), the manufacturer's versions of UNIX had 
> begun to differ.  But they had a common language C, since many, if not 
> most, used AT&T licensed C compilers, the compilers' input syntax was 
> already mostly common, but one of the things that this group realized 
> was it was still "work" for an ISV to move their UNIX based 
> application between systems and they needed something more than just a 
> language standard.
>
> To address this need /usr/group, formed a standard committee under 
> Heinz's leadership.  In 1985, we published the first UNIX standard.  
>  One of the members of the group, Jim Issak, who then was from another 
> small manufacturer building a system with a UNIX-like OS, Charles 
> River Data Systems (CRDS - BTW: pronounce that and smile -- marketing 
> people are wonderful),  realized that a /usr/group created standard 
> was helpful to us in the USA marketplace since /usr/group was not 
> accredited and thus our work would not be useful to be sent to the US 
> Gov much less and alter International standards body such as ECMA or ISO.
>
> BTW: since our OS's were already getting different beyond the system 
> call layer, we decided to start with just the system call API which 
> was mostly common, plus agree to an interface standard to exchange 
> magnetic media. But this is where things like the file <unistd.h> come 
> from to help make the differences contained in a manner that a 
> recompile allowed code to move from one vendor's system to another.
>
> By the early 1980 my former colleague, Maurice Graubie from Tektronix, 
> had been the chair of the IEEE 802 committee, which had published its 
> set of standards.  BTW the number.Xstuff raised huge hackles at IEEE 
> at the time.  It had never been done. Maurice had come up with 
> solutionas a way to keep the 801 standard together when it was 
> beginning to diverge and fall apart with the Ethernet folks on one 
> side and the IBM token ring folks on the other.
>
> Since the OS was similar to other electrical standards, allowing one 
> manufacturer to build something the US government buys and knowing 
> they could get something similar from someone else, Maurice introduced 
> Jim to the folks at IEEE. Jim succeeded in putting together all of the 
> paperwork, getting the proper sponsorship from IEEE institutional 
> members, and forming a committee to create IEEE Proposal 1003.
>
> As the next /usr/group meeting approached, we were already starting to 
> work on a revision. Jim explained the formal IEEE process. We 
> officially voted to disband that meeting and reconvene as IEEE P1003, 
> where Heinz graciously handed the gavel to Jim.  It also set us back a 
> bit because the /usr/group document was not in a form that IEEE could 
> accept.  So the first task was the rewrite (and use their voting 
> process) to have it accepted. But because of Maurice's great 
> compromise for the 802 committee, we started by saying this would be 
> the first of N standards,/i.e/., 1003.1 for the system calls, and we 
> would (like 802) create later standards for things like the commands.  
> I know that both Maurice and Jim had a little pushback by IEEE NYC, 
> but I am thankful that a good idea prevailed.
>
> It's possible ANSI might able to do the same thing that IEEE did.  But 
> the difference is that members of the/usr/group were all institutional 
> members of IEEE, and the style of things we needed to do at the time 
> was really the sort of thing IEEE was already accustomed to doing.  As 
> for the language, since ASA/ANSI was already doing things there - that 
> made sense.
>
> BTW: it has been observed that IEEE is behind VHDL - which is a 
> hardware description language.  But against this more in their world 
> -- it pushed to silicon manufacturers, so you know IP can be moved 
> between different fabs.   We can argue that it's a language, and ANSI 
> would have been a good place for it.
>
>
>

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