[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Doug McIlroy]

> When you say MIT you think about ITS and Lisp.  That is why emacs IMHO
> was against UNIX ideals.  RMS was thinking in different terms than Bell
> Labs hackers.

Very different. Once, when visiting the Lisp machine, I saw astonishingly
irrelevant things being done as first class emacs commands, and asked
how many commands there were. The instant answer was to have emacs 
print the list. Nice, but it scrolled way beyond one screenful. I
persisted: could the machine count them? It took several minutes of
head-scratching and false starts to do a task that was second nature
to Unix hands.

With hindsight, I realize that the thousand emacs commands were but a
foretaste of open-source exuberance--witness this snippet from Linux:
	!ls /usr/share/man/man2|wc
	    468     468    6766
Even a "kernel" is as efflorescent as a tropical rainforest.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Mutiny]

meanwhile the efflorescence grows (Fedora 26) to    482     482    7000From: Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu>Sent: Thu, 21 Sep 2017 15:41:41To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.orgSubject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!...With hindsight, I realize that the thousand emacs commands were but aforetaste of open-source exuberance--witness this snippet from Linux:   !ls /usr/share/man/man2|wc       468     468    6766Even a "kernel" is as efflorescent as a tropical rainforest.
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Nemo]

On 21/09/2017, Mutiny <mutiny.mutiny at rediffmail.com> wrote:
> meanwhile the efflorescence grows (Fedora 26) to
>    482     482    7000

> From: Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu>
> With hindsight, I realize that the thousand emacs commands were but a
> foretaste of open-source exuberance--witness this snippet from Linux:
>   !ls /usr/share/man/man2|wc
>       468     468    6766

Hhmmm... On Solaris 10/sparc:
  wc /usr/share/man/man1/wc.1
     138     467    3053

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Steve Johnson]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1985 bytes --]

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,  I suppose those of
us who worked on Unix should be very flattered.  I just wish they had
imitated the programming style and sense of taste.  The gcc
 _manual_ is 500 pages -- bigger than the entire Unix distribution. 
The options alone are almost 100 pages.  The average line in the
source code is an ifdef of some machine you've never heard of.  If
you are doing anything the slightest bit unusual (e.g., increasing the
default stack size) you need a different option for each machine
target.  Hmm, I thought the point of C was to be portable...

I recently started using clang, and I'm never going back to gcc.  I
feel so much cleaner now...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From:
 chet
.ramey
@case.edu

To:
"Ron Natalie" <ron
@ronnatalie
.com>, "Larry McVoy
" <lm
@mcvoy
.com>, "Theodore Ts'o
" <tytso
@mit
.edu
>
Cc:
<tuhs
@minnie
.tuhs
.org>
Sent:
Sun, 17 Sep
 2017 14:37:59 -0400
Subject:
Re: [TUHS
] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie
!

 On 9/16/17 8:59 AM, Ron Natalie wrote:
 > RMS
 hates UNIX. That was clear in the original manifesto. But he's also
 > a megalomaniac and believes that if you even use a GNU tool your
work
 > becomes his.

 Nah, this is BS. Stallman
 might not like Unix, and he clearly has a very
 large ego -- as do many of us here -- but that "belief" is just crap.
The
 thing that comes closest to it is bison, and the output of bison is
 explicitly excluded. There is the issue of GPL
 libraries (like readline
),
 and that's a pain for people who want to link with them, but that
doesn't
 count as "even use a GNU tool."

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

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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Clem Cole]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2095 bytes --]

On Sun, Sep 17, 2017 at 8:12 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

>
> OK, let's hit the reset button on this one.

​I agree,   Warren said something similar...​




> I'm happy that the GNU
> ​ ​
> project exists, I benefit from it every day.

​ditto.​




> I am explicitly stating
> ​ ​
> that I appreciate all of the work that people have done as volunteers,
> I'm one of them.

​And I'll add, we as a community owe a huge thank you to all of them,
particularly many smaller less known folks that have helped out over the
years.  I wish I could thank them all specifically.

I'll give RMS, Len and original GNU team credit for one really important
thing that happened early on.   It really was the getting a C compiler out
that there that worked (sort of) for so many systems.  This was the key
enabler more than anything else.  The C compiler that anyone could get,
that was freely available, was the watershed moment for all us.  [
​
​And Larry's right, the
 fact the Tiemann mopped up an
​d​
really move
​d​
it from being a toy to being something that was pretty creditable, it what
made the project actually have a
​ long term​
life
​]​
.​
​   If we had not had the compiler, almost all other project would not have
happened.


By getting a compiler that covered the primary architectures being used and
was quickly moved to so many OS's and generated 'good enough' code for so
many folks - we have the options we have today.

The only other compiler at the time, that could have done the same things
was Andy's Amsterdam Compiler Kit (which when it came out, was considered a
"better" compiler)​, but it had a small pay wall.  And 'free' as in 'beer'
was the important difference when it all started.

Like many of other Christiansen style disruptions.... 'worse' technology
was valuable and got better.   And the GNU C disrupted the order in the
software industry.
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Sep 17, 2017 at 02:43:33PM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
> On 9/16/17 9:43 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > I stand by my comment.  I'm friends with the Cygnus folks, they would
> > tend to agree with me I think.
> > 
> > All that stuff you listed, can you list the things that the GNU/FSF
> > people have funded?  Because I think there is close to nothing.  All of
> > that stuff is stuff that came under the GNU umbrella but they didn't do
> > the coding.
> 
> Is that the only criterion? Whether or not someone got paid directly by
> the FSF to do something?  Because there are lots of tools that were
> originally written by people funded by the FSF and then handed off to
> people like me: volunteers who donate our effort.
> 
> > 
> > I give credit to RMS for the GPL, that was cool.  But claiming credit
> > for stuff that GNU/FSF didn't do was not cool.
> 
> Denigrating the work of volunteers who explicitly donated their effort
> and talent to the FSF is not cool.

OK, let's hit the reset button on this one.  I'm happy that the GNU
project exists, I benefit from it every day.  I am explicitly stating
that I appreciate all of the work that people have done as volunteers,
I'm one of them.

What I'm not a fan of is Stallman getting people to put stuff under the
GPL and then acting like he/FSF wrote the code.  He still claims credit
for GCC to this day and the Stallman GCC was *nothing* like a Ken C
compiler, it was junk.  Tiemann at Sun and then Cygnus, did the real work
to make that thing actually be a reasonable program.  Don't believe me?
Go find a pre-Tiemann GCC and try and compile any reasonable program
with it.  As someone else pointed out, emacs wasn't RMS, it was Gosling.
RMS has a track record of starting stuff, hijacking stuff, and claiming
credit.  That is what I don't like.  I like the GNU project just fine,
I'm not a fan of people claiming credit for stuff they didn't do.

I really soured on on RMS when the FSF took my ls -h/du -h code and
"rewrote" it so they would not have to give me credit.  That's pretty
petty.  He did it because he hated me because BitKeeper wasn't open source
enough for him and the kernel was using it.  So he wanted to scrub the
GNU source base of any of my contributions.  So I stopped contributing.

I'll leave you with a story from the Cygnus days, I was friends with
all three founders.  I was having dinner with Gumby and Michael and
we were discussing RMS.  It was RMS this, RMS that.  Gumby's wife is
German and at one point she says "OMG, you mean RMS!".  We say "yeah?"
She says all this time I thought you were saying "Our mess".  We paused,
replayed the conversation, and were sort of stunned that every sentence
made sense with "our mess".

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Bakul Shah]

> The history of UNIX and its ilk fascinates me, but only half of it is
> technology.  The other half of it is a bizarre forty-year-long license
> war, which the partisans refuse to stop fighting, even after they win.
> 
> Yea...

Even discussions about GPL are viral!

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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/17/17 2:57 PM, Kurt H Maier wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 17, 2017 at 02:49:16PM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
>>
>> I remember multiple FSF efforts to solicit volunteers for named projects.
>> There were lots of people willing to donate their time and effort. And
>> at that time, there were very few non-FSF projects licensed under the GPL,
>> so the issue of "absorbtion" was minor to non-existent.
> 
> But that time changed, and was replaced by a time where the FSF pushed
> hard on copyright assignment to the FSF, and led to a time where we
> wound up with GPL, GPL2, GPL3, AGPL, LGPL, ad infinitum, which landed us
> in the present day, where half the tech organizations on earth are so
> unwilling to step into the morass that BSD/MIT licenses are making a big
> comeback.

This is all true, though I would argue that the "copyright assignment to
the FSF" was there from the beginning, and concealed by the fact that
the early work was directly funded by the FSF before being handed off.
Certainly they asked me for a copyright assignment early on, and this is
almost 30 years ago. There just weren't that many objections.

I would also argue that the different versions of the license were the
result of people asking for exceptions or clarifiations, and the FSF
attempting to accommodate them.

There's no question that the GNU project is at least as much of a social
policy effort as a technology one. You can't leave either one out of any
history.

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

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, Sep 17, 2017 at 12:57 PM, Kurt H Maier <khm at sciops.net> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 17, 2017 at 02:49:16PM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
> >
> > I remember multiple FSF efforts to solicit volunteers for named projects.
> > There were lots of people willing to donate their time and effort. And
> > at that time, there were very few non-FSF projects licensed under the
> GPL,
> > so the issue of "absorbtion" was minor to non-existent.
>
> But that time changed, and was replaced by a time where the FSF pushed
> hard on copyright assignment to the FSF, and led to a time where we
> wound up with GPL, GPL2, GPL3, AGPL, LGPL, ad infinitum, which landed us
> in the present day, where half the tech organizations on earth are so
> unwilling to step into the morass that BSD/MIT licenses are making a big
> comeback.
>

FreeBSD started out life with lots of GNU/GPL software. After GPLv3 was
released, the project made a conscious effort to move away from all GPL'd
software in the tree. When FreeBSD 12 comes out next year, there's a really
good chance all the GPL'd code will be gone from the tree.


> They've spent so much time trying to 'fix' international patent law by
> clubbing people with copyright licenses that the company behind the most
> popular linux distribution is working on a BSD-licensed kernel.
>

Fun times, that....


> The history of UNIX and its ilk fascinates me, but only half of it is
> technology.  The other half of it is a bizarre forty-year-long license
> war, which the partisans refuse to stop fighting, even after they win.
>

Yea...

Warner
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Kurt H Maier]

On Sun, Sep 17, 2017 at 02:49:16PM -0400, Chet Ramey wrote:
> 
> I remember multiple FSF efforts to solicit volunteers for named projects.
> There were lots of people willing to donate their time and effort. And
> at that time, there were very few non-FSF projects licensed under the GPL,
> so the issue of "absorbtion" was minor to non-existent.

But that time changed, and was replaced by a time where the FSF pushed
hard on copyright assignment to the FSF, and led to a time where we
wound up with GPL, GPL2, GPL3, AGPL, LGPL, ad infinitum, which landed us
in the present day, where half the tech organizations on earth are so
unwilling to step into the morass that BSD/MIT licenses are making a big
comeback.  

They've spent so much time trying to 'fix' international patent law by
clubbing people with copyright licenses that the company behind the most
popular linux distribution is working on a BSD-licensed kernel.

The history of UNIX and its ilk fascinates me, but only half of it is
technology.  The other half of it is a bizarre forty-year-long license
war, which the partisans refuse to stop fighting, even after they win.

khm

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/17/17 1:19 AM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> RMS wrote GCC initially.  And Emacs if that's what you use. And GDB
> initially as well. RMS did Texinfo (even if you don't like it yourself,
> it's a very nice markup language).
> 
> Bash, gawk, sed, grep, coreutils were (and still are) maintained by
> unpaid volunteers, true, but they all were started for the GNU project.
> (Bash in the early days may have been funded by the FSF.)

I remember multiple FSF efforts to solicit volunteers for named projects.
There were lots of people willing to donate their time and effort. And
at that time, there were very few non-FSF projects licensed under the GPL,
so the issue of "absorbtion" was minor to non-existent.

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

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/16/17 9:43 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> I stand by my comment.  I'm friends with the Cygnus folks, they would
> tend to agree with me I think.
> 
> All that stuff you listed, can you list the things that the GNU/FSF
> people have funded?  Because I think there is close to nothing.  All of
> that stuff is stuff that came under the GNU umbrella but they didn't do
> the coding.

Is that the only criterion? Whether or not someone got paid directly by
the FSF to do something?  Because there are lots of tools that were
originally written by people funded by the FSF and then handed off to
people like me: volunteers who donate our effort.

> 
> I give credit to RMS for the GPL, that was cool.  But claiming credit
> for stuff that GNU/FSF didn't do was not cool.

Denigrating the work of volunteers who explicitly donated their effort
and talent to the FSF is not cool.

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

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/16/17 8:59 AM, Ron Natalie wrote:
> RMS hates UNIX.   That was clear in the original manifesto.   But he's also
> a megalomaniac and believes that if you even use a GNU tool your work
> becomes his.

Nah, this is BS. Stallman might not like Unix, and he clearly has a very
large ego -- as do many of us here -- but that "belief" is just crap.  The
thing that comes closest to it is bison, and the output of bison is
explicitly excluded. There is the issue of GPL libraries (like readline),
and that's a pain for people who want to link with them, but that doesn't
count as "even use a GNU tool."

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

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Norman Wilson]

arnold at skeeve.com:

> This not true of ALL the GNU project maintainers.  Don't tar everyone
> with RMS's brush.

John Steinhart:

  What are we supposed to to then?  cpio?

===

I guess we're supposed to tp his house.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/15/17 11:40 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:

> As well it should be.  My colors are showing here, but I'm really sick
> of the FSF slapping their name on other people's work.  If Stallman
> wants it to be called GNU/Linux let him write a kernel.  He didn't,
> he can't, yet he wants credit.  I got pretty disgusted back in the day
> when everything that was GPLed suddenly became a GNU project.  The GNU
> guys have written very, very little code.
> 
> They are all about the license, which is fine, but I get off the bus
> when they are claiming credit for work they did not do.

You are associating not having a lot of paid employees with not having a
lot of people do work under the FSF banner. That's not close to true.

It's true that the FSF had few full-time employees. They worked off
grants.

It's not true that these folks didn't produce a lot of work: they did.

It's true that the volunteers who donated their work to the FSF did so
fully understanding what they were doing. Arnold and I have first-hand
experience here.

It's true that there were a number of projects that petitioned to come
under the FSF umbrella, and were accepted.

It's not true that everything released under the GPL became part of the
GNU project and was listed on www.gnu.org/software.

I get that you don't like the FSF model, but the organization and its
volunteers produced -- and continue to produce -- a significant body of
good work. Linux as people think of it today (no, it's not just a kernel)
really wouldn't exist without it.

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

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Warner Losh]

On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 8:18 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 08:14:47PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 7:55 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 01:20:00PM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> > > >
> > > > This not true of ALL the GNU project maintainers.  Don't tar everyone
> > > > with RMS's brush.
> > >
> > > What are we supposed to to then?  cpio?
> > >
> >
> > I think libarchive has largely replaced all that and understands zip,
> lzh,
> > etc.
>
> I think you missed Jon's joke.  If you want more of that, check out this
> thread:
>
> https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/70arwl/i_am_john_
> cleese_writer_actor_and_tall_person_ama/
>

I think you missed my "Why can't we all get along" moment :)

Warner
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[arnold]

RMS wrote GCC initially.  And Emacs if that's what you use. And GDB
initially as well. RMS did Texinfo (even if you don't like it yourself,
it's a very nice markup language).

Bash, gawk, sed, grep, coreutils were (and still are) maintained by
unpaid volunteers, true, but they all were started for the GNU project.
(Bash in the early days may have been funded by the FSF.)

You're welcome to stand by your comment, but --- as a GNU maintainer for
close to 30 years --- I think you paint with too broad a brush.

More than enough said,

Arnold

Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> I stand by my comment.  I'm friends with the Cygnus folks, they would
> tend to agree with me I think.
>
> All that stuff you listed, can you list the things that the GNU/FSF
> people have funded?  Because I think there is close to nothing.  All of
> that stuff is stuff that came under the GNU umbrella but they didn't do
> the coding.
>
> I give credit to RMS for the GPL, that was cool.  But claiming credit
> for stuff that GNU/FSF didn't do was not cool.
>
> On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 01:20:00PM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> > Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > The GNU guys have written very, very little code.
> > 
> > Um, let's see: Bash. gawk. sed. grep. coreutils. binutils. gcc. ...
> > Essentially everything that was used from the command line on a
> > standard Unix system. All reimplemented from scratch.
> > 
> > Many GNU maintainers are active (directly or indirectly) in the
> > POSIX standard efforts which influences all Unix implementations.
> > 
> > > They are all about the license, which is fine, but I get off the bus
> > > when they are claiming credit for work they did not do.
> > 
> > This not true of ALL the GNU project maintainers.  Don't tar everyone
> > with RMS's brush.
> > 
> > 'nuff said,
> > 
> > And, IMHO, all this is WAY off topic and probably should be brought
> > to a close.
> > 
> > Arnold
>
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2017-09-16 18:55, Jon Steinhart wrote:

> > This not true of ALL the GNU project maintainers.  Don't tar everyone
> > with RMS's brush.
> 
> What are we supposed to to then?  cpio?

pax posixana!

-- 
Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
Do obvious transformation on domain to reply privately _only_ on Usenet.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 08:14:47PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 7:55 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 01:20:00PM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> > >
> > > This not true of ALL the GNU project maintainers.  Don't tar everyone
> > > with RMS's brush.
> >
> > What are we supposed to to then?  cpio?
> >
> 
> I think libarchive has largely replaced all that and understands zip, lzh,
> etc.

I think you missed Jon's joke.  If you want more of that, check out this
thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/70arwl/i_am_john_cleese_writer_actor_and_tall_person_ama/

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Warner Losh]

On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 7:55 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 01:20:00PM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> >
> > This not true of ALL the GNU project maintainers.  Don't tar everyone
> > with RMS's brush.
>
> What are we supposed to to then?  cpio?
>

I think libarchive has largely replaced all that and understands zip, lzh,
etc.

Warner
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Jon Steinhart]

On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 01:20:00PM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
>
> This not true of ALL the GNU project maintainers.  Don't tar everyone
> with RMS's brush.

What are we supposed to to then?  cpio?

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Larry McVoy]

I stand by my comment.  I'm friends with the Cygnus folks, they would
tend to agree with me I think.

All that stuff you listed, can you list the things that the GNU/FSF
people have funded?  Because I think there is close to nothing.  All of
that stuff is stuff that came under the GNU umbrella but they didn't do
the coding.

I give credit to RMS for the GPL, that was cool.  But claiming credit
for stuff that GNU/FSF didn't do was not cool.

On Sat, Sep 16, 2017 at 01:20:00PM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > The GNU guys have written very, very little code.
> 
> Um, let's see: Bash. gawk. sed. grep. coreutils. binutils. gcc. ...
> Essentially everything that was used from the command line on a
> standard Unix system. All reimplemented from scratch.
> 
> Many GNU maintainers are active (directly or indirectly) in the
> POSIX standard efforts which influences all Unix implementations.
> 
> > They are all about the license, which is fine, but I get off the bus
> > when they are claiming credit for work they did not do.
> 
> This not true of ALL the GNU project maintainers.  Don't tar everyone
> with RMS's brush.
> 
> 'nuff said,
> 
> And, IMHO, all this is WAY off topic and probably should be brought
> to a close.
> 
> Arnold

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[arnold]

Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> The GNU guys have written very, very little code.

Um, let's see: Bash. gawk. sed. grep. coreutils. binutils. gcc. ...
Essentially everything that was used from the command line on a
standard Unix system. All reimplemented from scratch.

Many GNU maintainers are active (directly or indirectly) in the
POSIX standard efforts which influences all Unix implementations.

> They are all about the license, which is fine, but I get off the bus
> when they are claiming credit for work they did not do.

This not true of ALL the GNU project maintainers.  Don't tar everyone
with RMS's brush.

'nuff said,

And, IMHO, all this is WAY off topic and probably should be brought
to a close.

Arnold

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Andy Kosela]

On Saturday, September 16, 2017, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> RMS hates UNIX.   That was clear in the original manifesto.


There can be some truth in it -- after all he came from MIT, which was
anti-unix as much as you can get.

When you say MIT you think about ITS and Lisp.  That is why emacs IMHO
was against UNIX ideals.  RMS was thinking in different terms than Bell
Labs hackers.

--Andy
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Ron Natalie]

RMS hates UNIX.   That was clear in the original manifesto.   But he's also
a megalomaniac and believes that if you even use a GNU tool your work
becomes his.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 15 Sep 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 05:35:35PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:39:05PM -0700, Kurt H Maier wrote:
>>> On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:15:32PM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Isn't that pretty much just Lennart Poettering and his fan club?
>>>>
>>>
>>> It's right there in the name "GNU" as well.  There's a whole generation
>>> of computer people out here for whom bash and gawk are fossilized in
>>> their substrata, and they get mad when someone suggests maybe other
>>> tools exist.
>>
>> The use of "GNU" as in "GNU/Linux" is something that was pushed by
>> Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and actively abosed, or
>> mostly ignored by the majority of the Linux community.
>
> As well it should be.  My colors are showing here, but I'm really sick
> of the FSF slapping their name on other people's work.  If Stallman
> wants it to be called GNU/Linux let him write a kernel.  He didn't,
> he can't, yet he wants credit.  I got pretty disgusted back in the day
> when everything that was GPLed suddenly became a GNU project.  The GNU
> guys have written very, very little code.
>
> They are all about the license, which is fine, but I get off the bus
> when they are claiming credit for work they did not do.
>

The GNU Project has a kernel, The HURD, but iirc, it's still as unusable 
now as it has been for decades.  Which is why Linux wound up being the 
de-facto kernel of the GNU system, even while The HURD is still their 
official kernel.

-uso.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 05:35:35PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:39:05PM -0700, Kurt H Maier wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:15:32PM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> > > 
> > > Isn't that pretty much just Lennart Poettering and his fan club?
> > > 
> > 
> > It's right there in the name "GNU" as well.  There's a whole generation
> > of computer people out here for whom bash and gawk are fossilized in
> > their substrata, and they get mad when someone suggests maybe other
> > tools exist.
> 
> The use of "GNU" as in "GNU/Linux" is something that was pushed by
> Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and actively abosed, or
> mostly ignored by the majority of the Linux community.  

As well it should be.  My colors are showing here, but I'm really sick
of the FSF slapping their name on other people's work.  If Stallman
wants it to be called GNU/Linux let him write a kernel.  He didn't,
he can't, yet he wants credit.  I got pretty disgusted back in the day
when everything that was GPLed suddenly became a GNU project.  The GNU
guys have written very, very little code.

They are all about the license, which is fine, but I get off the bus
when they are claiming credit for work they did not do.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Chris Torek]

>Forget ports!  /usr/src is bad enough.  Running buildworld, it takes 
>longer to build the flippin' compilers (llvm) than it does to build the 
>entire rest of the OS.  This is not progress.

Common thread: LLVM is written in C++.

(Also, at some point during compilation, at least some versions
grow quite big, using 20 GB of RAM or whatever.  And C++ is hard
on the linkers as well...)

Chris

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[ron minnich]

huh. Time to build all of plan 9 -- libraries, commands, windowing system,
all kernels -- was always a few minutes. It was really annoying -- people
just assumed there
was not much capability there because it took less time to build than to
run an autoconf on GNU tools :-)

I wonder what Ken was doing wrong?

(fwiw, the Ken C compilers were a wonder -- they did not link against the C
library, they just made the system calls directly, malloc was defined to
brk(), and there was no free() -- and the code is tiny)

It's nice to see the kenc spirit still alive in the Go toolchain --
although that makes sense, since the up through 1.4 or so the go toolchain
was derived from ken c :-)

ron

On Fri, Sep 15, 2017 at 12:50 PM Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon at orthanc.ca> wrote:

> > In the spirit of complaining about compile times :-) ... I like to
> > build my freebsd ports tree from source.  Every time webkit2 needs
> > an update, my box (which I admit is no longer super-fast, but is
> > not exactly slow either) takes well over three hours to grind
> > through it, using all eight cores.  (I never timed it, I always
> > just left it to its own devices after a while.)
>
> Forget ports!  /usr/src is bad enough.  Running buildworld, it takes
> longer to build the flippin' compilers (llvm) than it does to build the
> entire rest of the OS.  This is not progress.
>
> --lyndon
>
>
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> In the spirit of complaining about compile times :-) ... I like to
> build my freebsd ports tree from source.  Every time webkit2 needs
> an update, my box (which I admit is no longer super-fast, but is
> not exactly slow either) takes well over three hours to grind
> through it, using all eight cores.  (I never timed it, I always
> just left it to its own devices after a while.)

Forget ports!  /usr/src is bad enough.  Running buildworld, it takes 
longer to build the flippin' compilers (llvm) than it does to build the 
entire rest of the OS.  This is not progress.

--lyndon

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Chris Torek]

>My DEC Rainbow running Venix (v7 port) takes about 15 hours to build the
>bits of the v7 tree that build on it.

In the spirit of complaining about compile times :-) ... I like to
build my freebsd ports tree from source.  Every time webkit2 needs
an update, my box (which I admit is no longer super-fast, but is
not exactly slow either) takes well over three hours to grind
through it, using all eight cores.  (I never timed it, I always
just left it to its own devices after a while.)

Much of this can be blamed on the complexity of compiling C++
in general (the "best type" matching rules are not simple).

Chris

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 09:40:27PM -0400, Ron Natalie wrote:
> 
> Frankly, I don't give a hoot about what the FSF or especially RMS cares
> about.   RMS used to show up at my house on a regular basis, and I spent
> time in the early FSF with some of the people I really respected other than
> RMS (like Len Tower).   RMS while condemning everybody else, cares little
> about other than himself and his sociopathically depraved views of the way
> the world should be.    And as Forrest Gump would say "Tha'ts all I have to
> say about that."

Amen.  Not a fan.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Ron Natalie]

Frankly, I don't give a hoot about what the FSF or especially RMS cares
about.   RMS used to show up at my house on a regular basis, and I spent
time in the early FSF with some of the people I really respected other than
RMS (like Len Tower).   RMS while condemning everybody else, cares little
about other than himself and his sociopathically depraved views of the way
the world should be.    And as Forrest Gump would say "Tha'ts all I have to
say about that."

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[ron minnich]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 4:06 PM Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:

>
>
> How hard would it be to replace linux with FreeBSD or plan9?
> I guess linux->plan9 is progressively less and less h/w
> support more and more fun to hack on the kernel!


whatever go runs on, u-root will run on, but there are places we had to use
Linux-specific stuff (e.g. netlink) that you'd have to write code for or
you won't get thinks like the ip command or dhcp client, and so on.
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Bakul Shah]

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 4:04 PM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
> 
> First off, this sounds cool! One nit pick though...
> 
> On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 4:52 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
> It takes about 15 seconds to compile all the tools at present. 
> 
> If you want to replicate the old-school Unix experience, you'd need it to take more like 15 hours to compile all the tools :)
> 
> My DEC Rainbow running Venix (v7 port) takes about 15 hours to build the bits of the v7 tree that build on it. I don't have the sources to Venix, but a long-term project is to recreate them using the compiler supplied and comparison to the binaries shipped...

You can do better than your old-school Unix experience with a pi and linux :-)
On the 1st gen RasPi the linux kernel took 10+ hours to build from scratch.
In contrast the plan9 kernel took one minute. The equivalent of FreeBSD's
"make world" for plan9 took 4 minutes. IIRC half of it was for ghostscript.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Bakul Shah]

> On Sep 14, 2017, at 3:52 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The u-root project (u-root.tk) is aimed at creating the *nix tools in Go. The targets are firmware where linux and an initramfs are loaded; and root file systems.
> 
> One goal was to get back to old school unix where the root always included the source to create the commands. In the non-firmware mode all the sources are there
> and they are compiled on demand, save for the 4 go tooclhain binaries and /init.
> 
> It takes about 15 seconds to compile all the tools at present. 
> 
> We've got a demo OS for Chromebooks based on u-root called NiChrome (NiChrome is an alloy of Chrome). This was a summer project for 2 interns here. It helped show that the idea can work to support an OS distro. 
> 
> We've also shown that linux and a u-root initramfs can replace most of UEFI firmware on the Open Compute Platform nodes, reducing boot time from 8 minutes to 17 seconds. Not as fast as the 3 seconds I'd like but you gotta start somewhere, and most of that time is beyond our control. 
> 
> We can always use help if you're interested. I'm ok with C for kernels but don't want to use it again in user mode, hence this 

Nice!

How hard would it be to replace linux with FreeBSD or plan9?
I guess linux->plan9 is progressively less and less h/w
support more and more fun to hack on the kernel! 

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Warner Losh]

First off, this sounds cool! One nit pick though...

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 4:52 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> It takes about 15 seconds to compile all the tools at present.
>

If you want to replicate the old-school Unix experience, you'd need it to
take more like 15 hours to compile all the tools :)

My DEC Rainbow running Venix (v7 port) takes about 15 hours to build the
bits of the v7 tree that build on it. I don't have the sources to Venix,
but a long-term project is to recreate them using the compiler supplied and
comparison to the binaries shipped...

Warner
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[ron minnich]

The u-root project (u-root.tk) is aimed at creating the *nix tools in Go.
The targets are firmware where linux and an initramfs are loaded; and root
file systems.

One goal was to get back to old school unix where the root always included
the source to create the commands. In the non-firmware mode all the sources
are there
and they are compiled on demand, save for the 4 go tooclhain binaries and
/init.

It takes about 15 seconds to compile all the tools at present.

We've got a demo OS for Chromebooks based on u-root called NiChrome
(NiChrome is an alloy of Chrome). This was a summer project for 2 interns
here. It helped show that the idea can work to support an OS distro.

We've also shown that linux and a u-root initramfs can replace most of UEFI
firmware on the Open Compute Platform nodes, reducing boot time from 8
minutes to 17 seconds. Not as fast as the 3 seconds I'd like but you gotta
start somewhere, and most of that time is beyond our control.

We can always use help if you're interested. I'm ok with C for kernels but
don't want to use it again in user mode, hence this project.

ron

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 3:39 PM Erik Berls <erik at ono-sendai.com> wrote:

> No, I am Spartacus!
>
> I've toyed with this idea as well, mostly for getting a NetBSD environment
> in a Docker container.
>
> Maybe we should pool resources?
>
> On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 15:04 Christian Groessler <chris at groessler.org>
> wrote:
>
>> On 09/14/17 21:52, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>>
>> > I never managed to pull it off, but I tried creating a full live Linux
>> > environment based on musl, clang, Heirloom Toolchest and
>> > OpenBSD/NetBSD sources.  The idea was that I wanted to make a "Real
>> > Unix" that happened to have Linux as its kernel.  (It also would have
>> > run the CDE as its default desktop.)
>>
>>
>> I, too, was toying with the idea of creating a NetBSD distribution which
>> uses the Linux kernel and NetBSD userland.
>> I very much like the concept of going to /usr/src and typing "make
>> build" (or "make world" on FreeBSD) and have the
>> whole base system rebuilt.
>>
>> I've played with Gentoo Linux which also builds from source, but I found
>> it too complicated (for me, at least). On the
>> BSDs it's just Makefiles, and no strange python (or whatever) scripts to
>> build the system.
>>
>> Maybe when I'm retired and have plenty of time...
>>
>> regards,
>> chris
>>
>> --
> -=erik.
> --
> Look, I lived through the Gray Davis years.  I *need* a UPS.
>
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Erik Berls]

No, I am Spartacus!

I've toyed with this idea as well, mostly for getting a NetBSD environment
in a Docker container.

Maybe we should pool resources?

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 15:04 Christian Groessler <chris at groessler.org>
wrote:

> On 09/14/17 21:52, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>
> > I never managed to pull it off, but I tried creating a full live Linux
> > environment based on musl, clang, Heirloom Toolchest and
> > OpenBSD/NetBSD sources.  The idea was that I wanted to make a "Real
> > Unix" that happened to have Linux as its kernel.  (It also would have
> > run the CDE as its default desktop.)
>
>
> I, too, was toying with the idea of creating a NetBSD distribution which
> uses the Linux kernel and NetBSD userland.
> I very much like the concept of going to /usr/src and typing "make
> build" (or "make world" on FreeBSD) and have the
> whole base system rebuilt.
>
> I've played with Gentoo Linux which also builds from source, but I found
> it too complicated (for me, at least). On the
> BSDs it's just Makefiles, and no strange python (or whatever) scripts to
> build the system.
>
> Maybe when I'm retired and have plenty of time...
>
> regards,
> chris
>
> --
-=erik.
--
Look, I lived through the Gray Davis years.  I *need* a UPS.
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Christian Groessler]

On 09/14/17 21:52, Steve Nickolas wrote:

> I never managed to pull it off, but I tried creating a full live Linux 
> environment based on musl, clang, Heirloom Toolchest and 
> OpenBSD/NetBSD sources.  The idea was that I wanted to make a "Real 
> Unix" that happened to have Linux as its kernel.  (It also would have 
> run the CDE as its default desktop.)


I, too, was toying with the idea of creating a NetBSD distribution which 
uses the Linux kernel and NetBSD userland.
I very much like the concept of going to /usr/src and typing "make 
build" (or "make world" on FreeBSD) and have the
whole base system rebuilt.

I've played with Gentoo Linux which also builds from source, but I found 
it too complicated (for me, at least). On the
BSDs it's just Makefiles, and no strange python (or whatever) scripts to 
build the system.

Maybe when I'm retired and have plenty of time...

regards,
chris

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:39:05PM -0700, Kurt H Maier wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:15:32PM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> > 
> > Isn't that pretty much just Lennart Poettering and his fan club?
> > 
> 
> It's right there in the name "GNU" as well.  There's a whole generation
> of computer people out here for whom bash and gawk are fossilized in
> their substrata, and they get mad when someone suggests maybe other
> tools exist.

The use of "GNU" as in "GNU/Linux" is something that was pushed by
Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and actively abosed, or
mostly ignored by the majority of the Linux community.  See [1] if you
want more details on that whole mess.  Of the distributions, I believe
only Debian has adopted the use of GNU/Linux in their official
documentation, but it's not used by most Debian users or developers
from my experience.

I'll also note that Debian has pushed to use /bin/dash, as their
default /bin/sh, and not /bin/bash, to try to make Debian's shell
scripts to be more portable.  (And for speed reasons, since dash is
faster than bash).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy

				- Ted

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Steve Nickolas]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2017, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:15:32PM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>>> Maybe some are deluded like that.  But the more typical case (and I saw
>>> this personally not just on "the Internet") are those who actively and
>>> consciously disdain Unix, and want Penguin kernel based systems to move
>>> to a completely new and different userland, free from any links to Unix
>>> history.
>>>
>>> And we should stop assuming they're kidding when they say so openly.
>>>
>>
>> Isn't that pretty much just Lennart Poettering and his fan club?
>
> It's mostly Lennart Poettering and his fan club, but it's also
> important to remember that Unix was not perfect.
>
> For years, I've been ranting about the telldir/seekdir interface, for
> which JFS has three b-trees that have to be updated for every
> directory operation --- one of which was added *just* because of
> telldir/seekdir.  Other file systems make other design choices or go
> through other bits of hell just because of telldir/seekdir, but
> assuming a 32-bit cookie which must survive potentially indefinitely,
> with the readdir "will return file names exactly zero or one times"
> guarantees required by POSIX, is rather hellish.
>
> Or, say the atime update requirement, which can be a performance
> killer, and for which the default on Linux violates Posix, and so I
> suppose it technically isn't allowed to use the Unix trademark anyway.
>
> I'm sure the Plan 9 folks could come up with other Unix shortcomings.  :-)
>
> 	   	       	     	     	    - Ted
>

I never managed to pull it off, but I tried creating a full live Linux 
environment based on musl, clang, Heirloom Toolchest and OpenBSD/NetBSD 
sources.  The idea was that I wanted to make a "Real Unix" that happened 
to have Linux as its kernel.  (It also would have run the CDE as its 
default desktop.)

One thing I did come up with was, if I were to pull it off, it would be a 
Linux distribution that rightfully could NOT be called, by any means, 
"GNU/Linux" - and some heads would explode.

(I still want to do it, but I remain at a loss as to execution.)

-uso.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Kurt H Maier]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:15:32PM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> 
> Isn't that pretty much just Lennart Poettering and his fan club?
> 

It's right there in the name "GNU" as well.  There's a whole generation
of computer people out here for whom bash and gawk are fossilized in
their substrata, and they get mad when someone suggests maybe other
tools exist.

khm

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:15:32PM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> > Maybe some are deluded like that.  But the more typical case (and I saw
> > this personally not just on "the Internet") are those who actively and
> > consciously disdain Unix, and want Penguin kernel based systems to move
> > to a completely new and different userland, free from any links to Unix
> > history.
> > 
> > And we should stop assuming they're kidding when they say so openly.
> > 
> 
> Isn't that pretty much just Lennart Poettering and his fan club?

It's mostly Lennart Poettering and his fan club, but it's also
important to remember that Unix was not perfect.

For years, I've been ranting about the telldir/seekdir interface, for
which JFS has three b-trees that have to be updated for every
directory operation --- one of which was added *just* because of
telldir/seekdir.  Other file systems make other design choices or go
through other bits of hell just because of telldir/seekdir, but
assuming a 32-bit cookie which must survive potentially indefinitely,
with the readdir "will return file names exactly zero or one times"
guarantees required by POSIX, is rather hellish.

Or, say the atime update requirement, which can be a performance
killer, and for which the default on Linux violates Posix, and so I
suppose it technically isn't allowed to use the Unix trademark anyway.

I'm sure the Plan 9 folks could come up with other Unix shortcomings.  :-)

	   	       	     	     	    - Ted

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Steve Nickolas]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2017, Ian Zimmerman wrote:

> On 2017-09-14 09:22, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>
>>> He continues to be missed.
>>
>> And I just wish that the Penguin/OS community would realise this; if
>> you believe those silly sods, you'd think that they invented Unix...
>
> Maybe some are deluded like that.  But the more typical case (and I saw
> this personally not just on "the Internet") are those who actively and
> consciously disdain Unix, and want Penguin kernel based systems to move
> to a completely new and different userland, free from any links to Unix
> history.
>
> And we should stop assuming they're kidding when they say so openly.
>
>

Isn't that pretty much just Lennart Poettering and his fan club?

-uso.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Ian Zimmerman]

On 2017-09-14 09:22, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> > He continues to be missed.
> 
> And I just wish that the Penguin/OS community would realise this; if
> you believe those silly sods, you'd think that they invented Unix...

Maybe some are deluded like that.  But the more typical case (and I saw
this personally not just on "the Internet") are those who actively and
consciously disdain Unix, and want Penguin kernel based systems to move
to a completely new and different userland, free from any links to Unix
history.

And we should stop assuming they're kidding when they say so openly.

-- 
Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet,
if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup.
Do obvious transformation on domain to reply privately _only_ on Usenet.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sun, 10 Sep 2017, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:

> I just want to say that Dennis Ritchie was "a scholar and a gentleman". 
> He was always warm, polite, friendly, and down to earth, both in his 
> correspondance with me, and in direct conversation the few times I 
> talked to him in person at USENIX conferences.  He helped out A LOT when 
> I had Unix history questions for whatever books I happened to be 
> writing.

He was at an AUUG conference in Sydney, and although I never got to shake 
hands with him (he had too many fans around him, and I had a home and a 
wife to go back to, not to mention two cats), he struck me as being the 
perfect gentleman.  Mr. and Mrs. Ritchie, you raised a damned good son...

> Not only to me, of course, but he was that way with everyone. He also 
> had a warm sense of humor, and was very active in the TUHS and Unix 
> history preservation.

Agreed.

> He continues to be missed.

And I just wish that the Penguin/OS community would realise this; if you 
believe those silly sods, you'd think that they invented Unix...

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Paul Winalski]

On 9/8/17, William Pechter <pechter at gmail.com> wrote:
> If it wasn't for Unix, it possibly would have been VMS on Alpha... Or OS/2.
> Early Windows 3.x wouldn't have cut it.
>
> Perhaps without the Unix workstations DEC might have survived.
>
> Interesting alternate history...

Clem Cole and I could go on for pages on why DEC went out of business.
But it's pretty much off-topic for this list.

SUN captured the workstation market from Apollo and DEC because they
managed to sell workstations cheaper than their competitors.  I don't
think that the OS being UNIX had very much to do with it.  But using
UNIX probably lowered SUN's software development costs, and no doubt
that contributed to their lower workstation cost.

What ultimately did in DEC was missing the PC wave.  PCs did the same
thing to the minicomputer and workstation companies that minicomputers
did to mainframes in the 1970s.  PCs offered equivalent (or better)
capabilities at much reduced cost.  First they ate the word processor
market (remember Wang?) and then minicomputers and workstations.  UNIX
workstation manufacturers such as SUN suffered the same fate as DEC at
the hands of the PC.  UNIX did not save them.

-Paul W.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Paul Winalski]

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On 9/9/17, Lawrence Stewart <stewart at serissa.com> wrote:
> What, you didn’t like IBM 2741 terminals that mechanically locked the
> keyboard?

In the business world, these terminals were typically half-duplex and
attached 4 or 8 (or more) to a control unit that communicated with the
computer using bisynch protocol.  It's like a telephone party
line--only one terminal can communicate with the computer at a time.
The remainder were locked out. [Note that Ethernet works pretty much
the same way.]  If you wanted to talk to the computer, you pressed the
"Request" key.  This caused the control unit to send an interrupt to
the computer, which in due course would then unlock your terminal and
talk to you.  This works out OK for transaction processing, but it's
not a good fit for interactive time-sharing.

-Paul W.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[arnold]

Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> Sadly no longer with us (he exited in 2011), he was forked in 1941.  Just 
> think, if it wasn't for him and Ken, we'd all be running Windoze, and 
> thinking it's wonderful.
>
> A Unix bigot through and through, I remain,
>
> -- 
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

I just want to say that Dennis Ritchie was "a scholar and a gentleman".
He was always warm, polite, friendly, and down to earth, both in his
correspondance with me, and in direct conversation the few times I
talked to him in person at USENIX conferences.  He helped out A LOT
when I had Unix history questions for whatever books I happened to
be writing.

Not only to me, of course, but he was that way with everyone. He also
had a warm sense of humor, and was very active in the TUHS and Unix
history preservation.

He continues to be missed.

Arnold

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Sat, 9 Sep 2017, Steve Johnson wrote:

> Part of that problem was probably electronic, not software.   Many of 
> the early terminals were half-duplex.  The normal mode was that the 
> terminal typed what came over the line, and the keyboard was locked.  If 
> you wanted to let the terminal send data, you needed to send a control 
> character to unlock the keyboard, and then another one to lock it when 
> you wanted to send data again.

Aah, well I remember the times that I felt like leaning over to hit
the Big Switch on our 360/50, when the console jammed...

That was the Blue Button, of course, not the Red Switch (we weren't 
allowed to pull that).

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Steve Johnson]

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Part of that problem was probably electronic, not software.   Many
of the early terminals were half-duplex.  The normal mode was that
the terminal typed what came over the line, and the keyboard was
locked.  If you wanted to let the terminal send data, you needed to
send a control character to unlock the keyboard, and then another one
to lock it when you wanted to send data again.

As you may know, the first PDP-11 at Bell Labs was financed by the
patent department because there were very draconian rules about
submitting patents (every page had to have exactly 50 numbered lines,
lines could not be blank, numbers must be in order, etc.)   A change
on page 3 of a 25-page patent application could mean that the whole
thing had to be retyped (yes, manually...).   That need drove a lot
of the early nroff work.  And, when upper/lower case terminals became
common, many still had half duplex interfaces.    When the Unix
software got good enough, it started to get used by real typists, who
were used to electric typewriters.  There was bitter complaint about
the half duplex (keyboard lock) mode -- the typists were so fast that
when the keyboard locked they could break their fingernails!  Full
duplex pretty much solved that problem, and Unix, as far as I
remember, embraced it earlier than most other systems.

Steve

PS:  The Usenix publication ";login:" got its name because that's
what a half-duplex system wrote for the login message when viewed on a
full duplex terminal.  The ; and : were actually control
characters...

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lawrence Stewart" <stewart@serissa.com>
To:"William Cheswick" <ches at cheswick.com>
Cc:"TUHS main list" <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:Sat, 9 Sep 2017 16:33:54 -0400
Subject:Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

 What, you didn’t like IBM 2741 terminals that mechanically locked
the keyboard?

On 2017, Sep 9, at 9:04 AM, William Cheswick <ches at cheswick.com [1]>
wrote:

Amen.  There were a number of things that really sucked at the time.
 
My least favorite: time sharing systems that didn’t allow
type-ahead.

Kids these days...

On 9Sep 2017, at 12:34 AM, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com [2]> wrote:

For people used to that world, "echo hello >hi" was literally jaw
dropping.  Many people had to have it explained twice, because they
literally could not conceive of a file being created so easily.  I
had worked in the computing center for a couple of years, and probably
gave more than my share of demos to mainframe users...
Steve

 

Links:
------
[1] mailto:ches at cheswick.com
[2] mailto:scj at yaccman.com

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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Lawrence Stewart]

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What, you didn’t like IBM 2741 terminals that mechanically locked the keyboard?

> On 2017, Sep 9, at 9:04 AM, William Cheswick <ches at cheswick.com> wrote:
> 
> Amen.  There were a number of things that really sucked at the time.  
> My least favorite: time sharing systems that didn’t allow type-ahead.
> 
> Kids these days...
> 
>> On 9Sep 2017, at 12:34 AM, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com <mailto:scj at yaccman.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> For people used to that world, "echo hello >hi" was literally jaw dropping.  Many people had to have it explained twice, because they literally could not conceive of a file being created so easily.  I had worked in the computing center for a couple of years, and probably gave more than my share of demos to mainframe users...
>> 
>> Steve
> 

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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sat, 9 Sep 2017, Arthur Krewat wrote:

> TOPS-10 allowed type-ahead, with the caveat that if a program exited with an 
> error, it would intentionally clear the TTY buffer. Something I actually 
> sorely miss.

That's actually a nice-ish feature.

> IIRC, the type-ahead buffer was only around 80 characters. If you exceeded 
> it, it beeped at you ;)

Reminds me of the 15-key buffer in the PC BIOS, which also beeps if you 
run out.

-uso.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Arthur Krewat]

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TOPS-10 allowed type-ahead, with the caveat that if a program exited 
with an error, it would intentionally clear the TTY buffer. Something I 
actually sorely miss.

IIRC, the type-ahead buffer was only around 80 characters. If you 
exceeded it, it beeped at you ;)



On 9/9/2017 9:04 AM, William Cheswick wrote:
> Amen.  There were a number of things that really sucked at the time.
> My least favorite: time sharing systems that didn’t allow type-ahead.
>
> Kids these days...
>
>> On 9Sep 2017, at 12:34 AM, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com 
>> <mailto:scj at yaccman.com>> wrote:
>>
>> For people used to that world, "echo hello >hi" was literally jaw 
>> dropping.  Many people had to have it explained twice, because they 
>> literally could not conceive of a file being created so easily.  I 
>> had worked in the computing center for a couple of years, and 
>> probably gave more than my share of demos to mainframe users...
>>
>> Steve
>

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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Steve Nickolas]

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On Sat, 9 Sep 2017, William Cheswick wrote:

> Amen.  There were a number of things that really sucked at the time.
> My least favorite: time sharing systems that didn’t allow type-ahead.
>
> Kids these days...

Oh geez. That sounds pants-on-head special.

-uso.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Clem Cole]

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below...

On Sat, Sep 9, 2017 at 12:34 AM, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:

>
> ​...​
>  At the time, the IBM 360 required that you run a special job step to
> create a file (we're talking punched cards here).  And then you had to pull
> that job step out of the deck because trying to create a file that already
> existed was an error.
>
​Point taken and sort of...TSS/360 and MTS was not (quite) as bad (although
it could be if you use the batch processing system), but Steve is right...
the idea of persistence was really not something people considered as
'easy' because it usually cost them money (real or allocated from the
computer center).

So I suspect part of it was the economics of storage at time.   On line
(magnetic) storage  was way more expensive than cards.   Its has been
pointed at the the original PDP-7 Ken used did not have a disk on it, it
was custom special DEC's CSS group had splicing a PDP-15 disk to it.  The
disk unit itself was manufactured by someone else (as were most/many of
DEC's disks for years).

Clay Christensen in "*The Innovator Dilemma" *has curves that actually
start a few years later when he studies the disk drive industry.   But its
the just part of the same effect he is talking about.

The key is the what UNIX was doing was not considered practical by the
mainframe folks, so people did not consider it.  It was a resources to be
protected (and to an extent, hoarded maybe).   Moore's Law, et al, was the
engine that allowed the UNIX innovation to really see light.  The way the
mainframes were doing things just did not make functional sense, but until
it was economical to do it otherwise - we were stuck.

As Steve says... it really was mind blowing for making things like this
easy.

Clem
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Sep 09, 2017 at 03:13:30PM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Sep 2017, William Pechter wrote:
> 
> >Perhaps the Prime OS or perhaps Domain OS from Apollo would have been the
> >workstation of the tech world.
> 
> I almost worked for Pr1me once (I worked next door to them in North Sydney);
> what stopped me was their notion that "1" was a prime number (yes, I'm a
> mathematician)...
> 
> >Apollo had a lead on Sun back in the day.
> 
> I used to work for Sun, and we hated Apollo :-)

Mr Yacc might like this story.

Before I worked for Sun I worked for Lachman (porting Unix to the ETA-10)
and the dev environment there was apollos served by a Sun 3/280 file
server.

I was fresh out of school, interviewed with Lachman for this job, they
sort of let me believe I'd be doing the VM system for this weird ass
machine that was basically a cluster with a huge (at the time) 2GB
"shared" memory that was bcopy only.  Seemed like a fun project.

I got there and they said "Um, you know, we have someone with more
than zero years of experience working on the VM system.  How about you
port all the commands?"  Crushed me was like "Really?" They said "Really".

Sigh, whatever.  So what I quickly learned was weird about this machine
was that native pointers pointed at bits.  The compiler writers were all
like "fuck that, we point at bytes" but they had to have a way to get to
real pointers so they decided that if you did 

	char	*p = &whatever;
	int	i = (int)p;

the assignment of a pointer into an int did the shift to point at the first
bit of that byte, and the other way shifted the other way.  Got it?  Ints
held "real" pointers and pointers held byte aligned pointers.  It was weird,
yes.

The unfortunate side effect is that 

	char	*p = malloc(10);

caused a shift if you didn't include malloc.h.  Because the compiler thought
malloc was returning a bit pointer so it "kindly" did the shift for us.

This quickly became a pattern.  Here is what I did:

First, and this is the apollo part, I ported the cross compiler from the
apollo environment to SunOS.  Because compiling on the file server was
faster in two ways: (a) local file system instead of NFS and (b) the Sun
was way way faster than those stupid apollo machines.  And the Sun was
real Unix.  The port caused all sorts of fuss because I wasn't part of
the compiler team, I had to write a tool that diffed the binaries produced
by the Sun with the ones produced by the apollos to show that the only
difference was in the a.out header that had a timestamp or something.

Second, and this is the part that Steve might like, I hacked lint suck
that when it complained about type mismatches it wandered around until
it got to the base types and printed out

	type mismatch: "INT" vs "POINTER"

which wasn't that easy, I didn't really understand the guts of lint.
I think those changes did wind their way back into Sys V lint somehow,
I had nothing to do with it, maybe someone from Lachman fed them back
or maybe the Sys V people redid them on their own.

OK, so now I lint all of /usr/src/cmd and I wrote an awk script (perl
wasn't around yet and awk worked fine) that looked for any int/pointer
mismatch, edited the file, and included every header I could think of
that declared some library function that returned a pointer, string.h,
malloc.h, etc.  I iterated a few times (this was an overnight thing,
I'd come in in the morning and see that I forgot some more, add them
to the list, restart the script).

Finally I get a clean lint run and I start up a compile run, fix up
a few remaining things (there were surprisingly few, it was an easy
port) and I've got a built /usr/src/cmd installed on piper1, my
test machine.  I go to my boss and say "I'm done".  Note that all of
this stuff, getting onboarded, porting the compiler, wacking lint,
linting, compiling, took about 3 weeks.  I was a busy little beaver :)

My boss goes "yeah, right.  Hey, Mike, go look at piper1 and see what
kind of a mess we have".  Mike goes off and comes back, gives me a
weird look, and says "He's right, he's done".  Sort of, we didn't have
tty's yet so vi didn't work, we didn't have a kmem driver so ps didn't
work (which was *really* annoying), etc.  But awk worked, find worked,
ls worked, all that stuff worked.

My boss says "get out of here, let me think about this".

I come back in the next day, go to my boss (Bob Palm if any of you
know him, great guy) and he says "You can go home, we'll just pay
you".  Turns out that Lachman had budgeted for 6 months to do the
/usr/src/cmd port and it didn't look good to have me sitting around
doing nothing.

I, being the nerd that I am, said "Do you mind if I stick around if
I'm doing work?"  Bob says "Go for it, you can do whatever you want
if you look busy".

And there began the most awesome 6 months of my life.  I wrote
my own version of ps and a /dev/ps driver that was a dumbed down
version of /dev/kmem, because I was too clueless to write a kmem
driver.  People used that ps for a long time until someone did a 
real kmem driver.

I wrote the Unix side of the disk driver, which sounds hard but 
wasn't, this thing had I/O channels that had their own processor
so it was more like writing a http client or something, just in 
the kernel.  The real driver was in the I/O channel, all I had to
do was learn how to talk to the I/O channel.  And it was a polling
driver, no interrupts, there was some hardware glitch with interrupts
or something, whatever the reason, I just polled so it was easy.
Shitty perf but easy.

I ported all of the Lachman STREAMS TCP stack.  If I recall correctly
shorts weren't shorts, they were u32.  So all the 

	unsigned short	port;

became

	unsigned short	port:16;

I remember the stack being the biggest job, there were some things
that turned out to be tricky, long forgotten.  Oh, I bet anything
a lot of it was the networking drivers.  I know some of it was 
me banging on stuff but I think there were some driver issues as
well, I didn't work on those, I'm not much of a device driver person.

After all this I got sent to Japan with 3 source tapes, the base system
that included all of /usr/src/cmd and everyone else's stuff that had 
sort of been approved for integration, a version of the tree with big
pages, and the version of the tree that had the networking stack in it.

I was sent to the Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT) and I was the techy
guy, they sent me with another Sun 3/280 and two Sun 3/50 (screw that
apollo crud) and told me to set up a dev environment and merge those
source trees.  So of course the server was installed as "bigtit" and
the 3/50's as "lefttit" and "righttit" which lasted until the Japanese
folks figured out what those meant.

I was there for 3 months, doing the merge wasn't easy and then other
problems cropped, again with the drivers if I remember correctly.
So the folks back in St Paul were sending me stuff, I was merging it,
building, installing, testing, reporting back what didn't work, and
that went on for quite a while.  Eventually it worked and home I 
went.  Lost a bunch of weight because I didn't like sushi at the 
time and there weren't a lot of good alternatives that kept my
weight up.  Fun times.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[William Cheswick]

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Amen.  There were a number of things that really sucked at the time.  
My least favorite: time sharing systems that didn’t allow type-ahead.

Kids these days...

> On 9Sep 2017, at 12:34 AM, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:
> 
> For people used to that world, "echo hello >hi" was literally jaw dropping.  Many people had to have it explained twice, because they literally could not conceive of a file being created so easily.  I had worked in the computing center for a couple of years, and probably gave more than my share of demos to mainframe users...
> 
> Steve

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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Steve Nickolas]

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On Sat, 9 Sep 2017, Michael Kjörling wrote:

> On 8 Sep 2017 18:28 -0400, from usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas):
>> Heck, even MS-DOS 2 as we knew it would not have been what it was,
>> were it not for Unix.
>
> Wasn't it MS-DOS 2 that introduced such advanced features as
> directories, pipes and general console I/O redirection?

For varying degrees of "pipes"; it implemented them with a temp file.  But 
yes, and that's exactly what I was referring to - it took those features 
from Xenix.  The API is pretty much as Unixlike as you could get on top of 
the INT21 interface and on a single-tasking system, I think.

> Of course most software that ran on top of DOS broke much of the
> redirection niceness by addressing the console directly via video
> memory access...

Of course.  But those kinds of programs often weren't the kind you'd want 
to redirect anyway.

-uso.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Michael Kjörling]

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On 8 Sep 2017 18:28 -0400, from usotsuki at buric.co (Steve Nickolas):
> Heck, even MS-DOS 2 as we knew it would not have been what it was,
> were it not for Unix.

Wasn't it MS-DOS 2 that introduced such advanced features as
directories, pipes and general console I/O redirection?

Of course most software that ran on top of DOS broke much of the
redirection niceness by addressing the console directly via video
memory access...

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
                 “People who think they know everything really annoy
                 those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 8 Sep 2017, William Pechter wrote:

> Perhaps the Prime OS or perhaps Domain OS from Apollo would have been 
> the workstation of the tech world.

I almost worked for Pr1me once (I worked next door to them in North 
Sydney); what stopped me was their notion that "1" was a prime number 
(yes, I'm a mathematician)...

> Apollo had a lead on Sun back in the day.

I used to work for Sun, and we hated Apollo :-)

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Steve Johnson]

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I'm not sure that the file and directory structure was all that
innovative (after all, the biologists had been doing that kind of
thing forever...).  But the file as a lightweight
flick-of-the-wrist-create-able entity was mind blowing.  At the time,
the IBM 360 required that you run a special job step to create a file
(we're talking punched cards here).  And then you had to pull that
job step out of the deck because trying to create a file that already
existed was an error.   In the GE/Honeywell time sharing system, you
had to invoke a subsystem that asked you 8 or 10 questions (name, what
device was it on, how big is upon creation, how big could it grow to,
what was its record size, etc.).   It stored up your answers and then
handed them to the OS.  It was easy to get a question wrong, in which
case it sent you back to the beginning to do the dance again.  Most
telling, when the file was finally created the subsystem exited with
the happy message "Successful!"

For people used to that world, "echo hello >hi" was literally jaw
dropping.  Many people had to have it explained twice, because they
literally could not conceive of a file being created so easily.  I
had worked in the computing center for a couple of years, and probably
gave more than my share of demos to mainframe users...

Steve

PS:  It was about this time that a survey of the mainframe computer
centers found that over 50% of the (costly, limited) disc space
consisted of trailing blanks of 80-column card images stored on
disc. 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Wesley Parish" <wes.parish@paradise.net.nz>
To:<tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
Cc:
Sent:Sat, 09 Sep 2017 13:16:30 +1200 (NZST)
Subject:Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

 'fraid so. The Unix directory structure and the correlating free-form
file competed with the file-as-
 record-structure and directory-as-record-structure in the seventies
and eighties. The competition had 
 finished by the nineties, and hardly anybody remembers it now.

 Seriously, how many grandmothers can you think of who would know how
to allocate disk space for a 
 photo of their grandkids? Who would be able to guess how many bytes a
letter might take up?

 Free-form files and directory nodes (with the corresponding
requirement that the OS know how to 
 allocate and reallocate disk space) helped democratize computing.

 Just my 0.02c :)

 Wesley Parish

 Quoting Michael Kjörling <michael at kjorling.se>:

 > On 8 Sep 2017 17:04 -0400, from jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel
Chiappa):
 > > We'd be running a Windows even worse than current Windows (which
has
 > managed
 > > to pick up a few decent ideas from places like Unix).
 > 
 > Like directories, and free-form files (collections of bytes as
opposed
 > to collections of records)?
 > 
 > -- 
 > Michael Kjörling ⢠https://michael.kjorling.se â¢
 > michael at kjorling.se
 > âPeople who think they know everything really annoy
 > those of us who know we donât.â (Bjarne Stroustrup)
 > 

 "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." -
Ferdinand Sor,
 Method for Guitar

 "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
Goldwyn

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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 8 Sep 2017, William Pechter wrote:

> Perhaps without the Unix workstations DEC might have survived.

Sigh :-)  RSTS, RSX-11[MD], Pick, VMS, etc; they've all taken on Unix, and 
I've been privileged to see them all off :-)

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Wesley Parish]

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'fraid so. The Unix directory structure and the correlating free-form file competed with the file-as-
record-structure and directory-as-record-structure in the seventies and eighties. The competition had 
finished by the nineties, and hardly anybody remembers it now.

Seriously, how many grandmothers can you think of who would know how to allocate disk space for a 
photo of their grandkids? Who would be able to guess how many bytes a letter might take up?

Free-form files and directory nodes (with the corresponding requirement that the OS know how to 
allocate and reallocate disk space) helped democratize computing.

Just my 0.02c :)

Wesley Parish

Quoting Michael Kjörling <michael at kjorling.se>:

> On 8 Sep 2017 17:04 -0400, from jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa):
> > We'd be running a Windows even worse than current Windows (which has
> managed
> > to pick up a few decent ideas from places like Unix).
> 
> Like directories, and free-form files (collections of bytes as opposed
> to collections of records)?
> 
> -- 
> Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se •
> michael at kjorling.se
>  “People who think they know everything really annoy
>  those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)
>  



"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar

"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[William Pechter]

If no Unix... No Mac OSx or Linux or *BSD.

Linux came from the Posix spec.  OSx came from a Unix personality on Mach...

Perhaps the Prime OS or  perhaps Domain OS from Apollo would have been the workstation of the tech world. 

Apollo had a lead on Sun back in the day. 

Bill 
Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: Angus Robinson <angus@fairhaven.za.net>
To: William Pechter <pechter at gmail.com>, The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs at tuhs.org>, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org>
Sent: Fri, 08 Sep 2017 18:14
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

You also would have Mac OS, Linux,etc

On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 5:14 PM William Pechter <pechter at gmail.com> wrote:

> If it wasn't for Unix, it possibly would have been VMS on Alpha... Or
> OS/2.  Early Windows 3.x wouldn't have cut it.
>
> Perhaps without the Unix workstations DEC might have survived.
>
> Interesting alternate history...
>
> Bill
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org>
> To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> Sent: Fri, 08 Sep 2017 16:56
> Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!
>
> Sadly no longer with us (he exited in 2011), he was forked in 1941.  Just
> think, if it wasn't for him and Ken, we'd all be running Windoze, and
> thinking it's wonderful.
>
> A Unix bigot through and through, I remain,
>
> --
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will
> suffer."
>

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Steve Nickolas]

On Fri, 8 Sep 2017, Noel Chiappa wrote:

>    > From: Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org>
>
>    > Just think, if it wasn't for him and Ken, we'd all be running Windoze,
>    > and thinking it's wonderful.
>
> It's actually worse than that.
>
> We'd be running a Windows even worse than current Windows (which has managed
> to pick up a few decent ideas from places like Unix).
>
> 	Noel
>

Heck, even MS-DOS 2 as we knew it would not have been what it was, were it 
not for Unix.

-uso.

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Angus Robinson]

You also would have Mac OS, Linux,etc

On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 5:14 PM William Pechter <pechter at gmail.com> wrote:

> If it wasn't for Unix, it possibly would have been VMS on Alpha... Or
> OS/2.  Early Windows 3.x wouldn't have cut it.
>
> Perhaps without the Unix workstations DEC might have survived.
>
> Interesting alternate history...
>
> Bill
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org>
> To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> Sent: Fri, 08 Sep 2017 16:56
> Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!
>
> Sadly no longer with us (he exited in 2011), he was forked in 1941.  Just
> think, if it wasn't for him and Ken, we'd all be running Windoze, and
> thinking it's wonderful.
>
> A Unix bigot through and through, I remain,
>
> --
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will
> suffer."
>
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[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[William Pechter]

If it wasn't for Unix, it possibly would have been VMS on Alpha... Or OS/2.  Early Windows 3.x wouldn't have cut it.

Perhaps without the Unix workstations DEC might have survived.

Interesting alternate history...

Bill


-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs at tuhs.org>
Sent: Fri, 08 Sep 2017 16:56
Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

Sadly no longer with us (he exited in 2011), he was forked in 1941.  Just 
think, if it wasn't for him and Ken, we'd all be running Windoze, and 
thinking it's wonderful.

A Unix bigot through and through, I remain,

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Michael Kjörling]

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On 8 Sep 2017 17:04 -0400, from jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa):
> We'd be running a Windows even worse than current Windows (which has managed
> to pick up a few decent ideas from places like Unix).

Like directories, and free-form files (collections of bytes as opposed
to collections of records)?

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
                 “People who think they know everything really annoy
                 those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Arthur Krewat]

Seconded.

Who knows, may we wouldn't even have Windows.

On 9/8/2017 4:54 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> Sadly no longer with us (he exited in 2011), he was forked in 1941. 
> Just think, if it wasn't for him and Ken, we'd all be running Windoze, 
> and thinking it's wonderful.
>
> A Unix bigot through and through, I remain,
>

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org>

    > Just think, if it wasn't for him and Ken, we'd all be running Windoze,
    > and thinking it's wonderful.

It's actually worse than that.

We'd be running a Windows even worse than current Windows (which has managed
to pick up a few decent ideas from places like Unix).

	Noel

[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Dave Horsfall]

Sadly no longer with us (he exited in 2011), he was forked in 1941.  Just 
think, if it wasn't for him and Ken, we'd all be running Windoze, and 
thinking it's wonderful.

A Unix bigot through and through, I remain,

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."