From: Andrew Warkentin <andreww591@gmail.com>
To: The Eunuchs Historic Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question"
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2020 16:11:39 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAD-qYGrEAsOzW=UvODQsvDtS8t8Xe9S0xdO07es1E5atQtmfLA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <C7972CAB-7A91-49CD-9F7A-9675400E81E5@alchemistowl.org>
On 1/17/20, Arrigo Triulzi <arrigo@alchemistowl.org> wrote:
>
> The answers I got varied from “the world needed a free Unix and BSD was
> embroiled in the AT&T lawsuit at the time” to “Plan 9 also had a restrictive
> license” (to the latter my response was that “so did Unix and that’s why
> Linus built Linux!”) but I don’t feel any of the answers addressed my
> underlying question as to what was wrong in the exposure to other operating
> systems which made Unix the choice?
>
Linus has always struck me as purely a pragmatist and not idealistic
at all, so I'm not surprised that he wrote a conventional Unix rather
than something more architecturally progressive.
On 1/17/20, Brantley Coile <brantley@coraid.com> wrote:
>
> Plan 9 solves the problem of "How do I make a bunch of machines look like a
> single system?" If you wanted to mess around with a system in the early
> 1990's you didn't have a bunch of people and a bunch of systems you needed
> to make appear as one. You just had a single box.
>
> So, my Plan 9 remains small. In fact, I've been removing things from it,
> like local disks, that is contrary to the original vision. (Or set of
> visions. I remember getting a lot of different answers form everyone
> involved in 1127 about what it was that they were doing.)
>
Wasn't the point of single-system-image clustering originally to allow
building relatively inexpensive systems with more CPUs than could
reasonably be fit into a single machine? Now that all current CPUs
except for some low-end embedded ones are multi-core and fully
programmable GPUs are ubiquitous, I don't think Plan 9/Amoeba-style
SSI is really all that relevant for anything other than HPC. However,
I do think distributed network-transparent sharing of devices and
services along the lines of QNX or Domain/OS is more relevant than
ever.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-01-17 23:12 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 49+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-01-17 16:01 Arrigo Triulzi
2020-01-17 16:53 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-17 17:08 ` Arrigo Triulzi
2020-01-17 17:25 ` Brantley Coile
2020-01-17 19:59 ` Arno Griffioen
2020-01-18 3:50 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-18 4:19 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-18 15:25 ` Larry McVoy
2020-01-18 16:19 ` reed
2020-01-19 2:49 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-19 3:12 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-19 3:47 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Warren Toomey
2020-01-19 3:51 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-19 3:58 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-19 13:25 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-19 13:48 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-20 3:32 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-20 3:51 ` George Michaelson
2020-01-20 3:59 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Jon Forrest
2020-01-20 17:19 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Clem Cole
2020-01-20 17:49 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-20 19:00 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-20 18:04 ` Larry McVoy
2020-01-20 18:09 ` David Barto
2020-01-20 18:34 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Arthur Krewat
2020-01-20 19:18 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Clem Cole
2020-01-20 19:46 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-20 20:15 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 6:58 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Lars Brinkhoff
2020-01-21 14:30 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 17:17 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-21 17:22 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-21 17:25 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-21 18:43 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 18:44 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 19:14 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-21 20:27 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-22 0:14 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Greg A. Woods
2020-01-21 0:44 ` Bakul Shah
2020-01-20 19:09 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-20 19:51 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-20 23:04 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-21 0:13 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-21 23:45 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-18 15:30 ` [TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question" Larry McVoy
2020-01-17 23:11 ` Andrew Warkentin [this message]
2020-01-17 23:20 ` Rob Pike
2020-01-17 23:38 ` Brantley Coile
2020-01-18 0:23 ` Wesley Parish
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