[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dan Cross]

On Sat, Feb 3, 2018 at 5:59 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 3 Feb 2018, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>
>> I would imagine that Windows wouldn't be what it is today without UNIX.
>> Matter of fact, Windows NT (which is what Windows has been based on since
>> Windows ME went away) is really DEC's VMS underneath the covers at least to
>> a small extent.
>>
>
> I thought that NT has a POSIX-y kernel, which is why it was so reliable?
> Or was VMS a POSIX-like system?  I only used it for a couple of years in
> the early 80s (up to 4.0, I think), and never dug inside it; to me, it was
> just RSX-11/RSTS-11 on steroids.


The design of the original NT kernel was overseen by Dave Cutler, of VMS
and RSX-11M fame, and had a very strong and apparent VMS influence. Some
VAX wizards I know told me that they saw a lot of VMS in NT's design, but
that it probably wasn't as good (different design goals, etc: apparently
Gates wanted DOS++ and a quick time to market; Cutler wanted to do a *real*
OS and they compromised to wind up with VMS--).

It's true that there was (is? I don't know anymore...) a POSIX subsystem,
but that seemed more oriented at being a marketing check in the box for
sales to the US government and DoD (which had "standardized" on POSIX and
made it a requirement when investing in new systems).

Now days, I understand that one can run Linux binaries natively; the
Linux-compatibility subsystem will even `apt-get install` dependencies for
you. Satya Nadella's company isn't your father's Microsoft anymore. VSCode
(their new snazzy editor that apparently all the kids love) is Open Source.

Note that there is some irony in the NT/POSIX thing: the US Government
standardized on Windows about two decades ago and now can't seem to figure
out how to get off of it.

A short story I can't resist telling: a couple of years ago, some folks
tried to recruit me back into the Marine Corps in some kind of technical
capacity. I asked if I'd be doing, you know, technical stuff and was told
that, since I was an officer no, I wouldn't. Not really interested. I ended
up going to a bar with a recon operator (Marine special operations) to get
the straight scoop and talking to a light colonel (that's a Lieutenant
Colonel) on the phone for an hour for the hard sell. Over a beer, the recon
bubba basically said, "It was weird. I went back to the infantry." The
colonel kept asking me why I didn't run Windows: "but it's the most popular
operating system in the world!" Actually, I suspect Linux and BSD in the
guise of iOS/macOS is running on a lot more devices than Windows at this
point. I didn't bother pointing that out to him.

Would VMS become what it was without UNIX's influence? Would UNIX become
>> what it later was without VMS?
>>
>> Would UNIX exist, or even be close to what it became without DEC?
>>
>
> I've oft wondered that, but we have to use a new thread to avoid
> embarrassing Ken :-)
>

The speculation of, "what would have happened?" is interesting, though of
course unanswerable. I suspect that had it not been for Unix, we'd all be
running software that was closer to what you'd find on a mainframe or RT-11.

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Nemo Nusquam]

On 02/03/18 19:37, Dan Cross wrote (in part):
> The design of the original NT kernel was overseen by Dave Cutler, of VMS
> and RSX-11M fame, and had a very strong and apparent VMS influence. Some
> VAX wizards I know told me that they saw a lot of VMS in NT's design,
> but that it probably wasn't as good (different design goals, etc:
> apparently Gates wanted DOS++ and a quick time to market; Cutler wanted
> to do a *real* OS and they compromised to wind up with VMS--).

I recall that Cutler wanted a portable OS and had a cli version running 
on MIPS first.  Eventually, Gates ordered a GUI "bolted on" and things 
went bad.

> It's true that there was (is? I don't know anymore...) a POSIX
> subsystem, but that seemed more oriented at being a marketing check in
> the box for sales to the US government and DoD (which had "standardized"
> on POSIX and made it a requirement when investing in new systems).

Indeed, but it was functionally useless in that it could interact with 
the NT system.  It always reminds of the time that NT obtained FIPS 140 
Level 1 but with no network. (Had NIST not re-organised their website, I 
would link to the certificate.)

N.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Wesley Parish]

From what little I know, Dave Cutler was wanting to work on a VMS
(Next Generation) at DEC, but couldn't manage to get management to
agree, so when the possibility of doing a VMS (Next Gen) at Microsoft
came up, he jumped for it.

At least that's what I read back in the late 90s. I've forgotten where
I read it, unfortunately, so unless someone can come up with a source
for it, best treat it with a pinch of salt.

Wesley Parish

On 2/4/18, Nemo Nusquam <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/03/18 19:37, Dan Cross wrote (in part):
>> The design of the original NT kernel was overseen by Dave Cutler, of VMS
>> and RSX-11M fame, and had a very strong and apparent VMS influence. Some
>> VAX wizards I know told me that they saw a lot of VMS in NT's design,
>> but that it probably wasn't as good (different design goals, etc:
>> apparently Gates wanted DOS++ and a quick time to market; Cutler wanted
>> to do a *real* OS and they compromised to wind up with VMS--).
>
> I recall that Cutler wanted a portable OS and had a cli version running
> on MIPS first.  Eventually, Gates ordered a GUI "bolted on" and things
> went bad.
>
>> It's true that there was (is? I don't know anymore...) a POSIX
>> subsystem, but that seemed more oriented at being a marketing check in
>> the box for sales to the US government and DoD (which had "standardized"
>> on POSIX and made it a requirement when investing in new systems).
>
> Indeed, but it was functionally useless in that it could interact with
> the NT system.  It always reminds of the time that NT obtained FIPS 140
> Level 1 but with no network. (Had NIST not re-organised their website, I
> would link to the certificate.)
>
> N.
>

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Warner Losh]

On Sat, Feb 3, 2018 at 10:06 PM, Wesley Parish <wobblygong at gmail.com> wrote:

> From what little I know, Dave Cutler was wanting to work on a VMS
> (Next Generation) at DEC, but couldn't manage to get management to
> agree, so when the possibility of doing a VMS (Next Gen) at Microsoft
> came up, he jumped for it.
>
> At least that's what I read back in the late 90s. I've forgotten where
> I read it, unfortunately, so unless someone can come up with a source
> for it, best treat it with a pinch of salt.


This was certainly the story that was going around at the time...

Warner


>
> Wesley Parish
>
> On 2/4/18, Nemo Nusquam <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 02/03/18 19:37, Dan Cross wrote (in part):
> >> The design of the original NT kernel was overseen by Dave Cutler, of VMS
> >> and RSX-11M fame, and had a very strong and apparent VMS influence. Some
> >> VAX wizards I know told me that they saw a lot of VMS in NT's design,
> >> but that it probably wasn't as good (different design goals, etc:
> >> apparently Gates wanted DOS++ and a quick time to market; Cutler wanted
> >> to do a *real* OS and they compromised to wind up with VMS--).
> >
> > I recall that Cutler wanted a portable OS and had a cli version running
> > on MIPS first.  Eventually, Gates ordered a GUI "bolted on" and things
> > went bad.
> >
> >> It's true that there was (is? I don't know anymore...) a POSIX
> >> subsystem, but that seemed more oriented at being a marketing check in
> >> the box for sales to the US government and DoD (which had "standardized"
> >> on POSIX and made it a requirement when investing in new systems).
> >
> > Indeed, but it was functionally useless in that it could interact with
> > the NT system.  It always reminds of the time that NT obtained FIPS 140
> > Level 1 but with no network. (Had NIST not re-organised their website, I
> > would link to the certificate.)
> >
> > N.
> >
>
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Paul Winalski]

On 2/4/18, Wesley Parish <wobblygong at gmail.com> wrote:
> From what little I know, Dave Cutler was wanting to work on a VMS
> (Next Generation) at DEC, but couldn't manage to get management to
> agree, so when the possibility of doing a VMS (Next Gen) at Microsoft
> came up, he jumped for it.

By the mid-to-late 1980s, advances in CPU technology tilted the
performance field in favor of RISC architectures vs. complicated CISC
such as VAX or x86.  Both DEC and Intel were looking for alternatives.
Intel eventually settled on a VLIW architecture that became Itanium.
DEC's first attempt at a VAX successor was a RISC architecture called
PRISM.  It was developed by Dave Cutler's team in Seattle.  On the
software side, they were working on an OS called MICA.  It was to be a
successor to the VAXeln microkernel-based realtime system and was to
have both VMS and Unix kernel interfaces (personality modules).

Someone (Gordon Bell, I think) once said of DEC's decision making
process, "any decision worth making once is worth making again".  In
typical DEC fashion, another RISC architecture was designed by DEC's
east coast engineering team.  This architecture eventually ended up
being called Alpha.  The east coast won the political battle.  PRISM
and MICA were cancelled.  The idea of a single kernel with multiple OS
personalities was dropped; VMS and Unix were ported separately to
Alpha.

After PRISM was cancelled, Dave Cutler left DEC and went to Microsoft
as architect for their new OS.  Under the covers, the original Windows
NT looked a lot like MICA, VAXeln, and VMS before it.  Not surprising
since they shared the same designer.  Like MICA, Windows NT was
microkernel-based, with OS personality modules layered on top.  There
were two of these originally:  Win32 and POSIX.  Microsoft and Intel
were having a little lover's quarrel at the time--Intel didn't like
Microsoft's forays into the hardware side of things with Xbox and the
like; Microsoft wasn't pleased by Intel doing its own compilers, etc.
This led to Microsoft porting Windows NT to both PowerPC and Alpha.
Neither port caught on in the marketplace.

-Paul W.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Michael Kjörling]

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On 5 Feb 2018 14:43 -0500, from paul.winalski at gmail.com (Paul Winalski):
> This architecture eventually ended up
> being called Alpha.  The east coast won the political battle.  PRISM
> and MICA were cancelled.

Out of curiosity, when was this? Obviously it's later than "the
mid-to-late 1980s", but more precisely than that?


> After PRISM was cancelled, Dave Cutler left DEC and went to Microsoft
> as architect for their new OS.  Under the covers, the original Windows
> NT looked a lot like MICA, VAXeln, and VMS before it.  Not surprising
> since they shared the same designer.  Like MICA, Windows NT was
> microkernel-based, with OS personality modules layered on top.  There
> were two of these originally:  Win32 and POSIX.  Microsoft and Intel
> were having a little lover's quarrel at the time--Intel didn't like
> Microsoft's forays into the hardware side of things with Xbox and the
> like; Microsoft wasn't pleased by Intel doing its own compilers, etc.
> This led to Microsoft porting Windows NT to both PowerPC and Alpha.
> Neither port caught on in the marketplace.

Honestly, I think you've got the timeline mixed up. Wikipedia puts the
Xbox introduction in 2001, which sounds about right to me. Designing
the core of the original Windows NT would be about a decade before
that, maybe a little earlier still, around 1990-ish. Around 1990 in
terms of game consoles was the Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive
(A.K.A. Sega Genesis), which the original Xbox was definitely _not_
contemporary with. I _think_ (but could certainly be mistaken about
this) that Windows 2000 ("NT 5") was the release that dropped several
non-Intel architectures; I'm _almost_ certain that NT 4 shipped with a
bunch of versions on the same installation CD, and believe that those
included both PowerPC and Alpha.

Also, I think the original NT "personality modules" included OS/2 (but
without Presentation Manager, the OS/2 GUI, so it only supported
text-mode OS/2 applications). The way I recall it, the OS/2 module was
a first-class citizen in NT 3.x, relegated to second-class citizen
status in NT 4.0 (it was there, but you had to jump through some hoops
to get it installed), and dropped with 5.0/2000.

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
  “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person
              is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Steve Nickolas]

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On Mon, 5 Feb 2018, Michael Kjörling wrote:

> Honestly, I think you've got the timeline mixed up. Wikipedia puts the
> Xbox introduction in 2001, which sounds about right to me. Designing
> the core of the original Windows NT would be about a decade before
> that, maybe a little earlier still, around 1990-ish. Around 1990 in
> terms of game consoles was the Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive
> (A.K.A. Sega Genesis), which the original Xbox was definitely _not_
> contemporary with. I _think_ (but could certainly be mistaken about
> this) that Windows 2000 ("NT 5") was the release that dropped several
> non-Intel architectures; I'm _almost_ certain that NT 4 shipped with a
> bunch of versions on the same installation CD, and believe that those
> included both PowerPC and Alpha.

Pretty sure at least PPC was supported by NT4, but don't quote me.

> Also, I think the original NT "personality modules" included OS/2 (but
> without Presentation Manager, the OS/2 GUI, so it only supported
> text-mode OS/2 applications). The way I recall it, the OS/2 module was
> a first-class citizen in NT 3.x, relegated to second-class citizen
> status in NT 4.0 (it was there, but you had to jump through some hoops
> to get it installed), and dropped with 5.0/2000.

3.51 and 4.0, at least, both had a paid add-on for PM application support.

-uso.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Warner Losh]

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On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 5:37 PM, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:

> On Mon, 5 Feb 2018, Michael Kjörling wrote:
>
> Honestly, I think you've got the timeline mixed up. Wikipedia puts the
>> Xbox introduction in 2001, which sounds about right to me. Designing
>> the core of the original Windows NT would be about a decade before
>> that, maybe a little earlier still, around 1990-ish. Around 1990 in
>> terms of game consoles was the Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive
>> (A.K.A. Sega Genesis), which the original Xbox was definitely _not_
>> contemporary with. I _think_ (but could certainly be mistaken about
>> this) that Windows 2000 ("NT 5") was the release that dropped several
>> non-Intel architectures; I'm _almost_ certain that NT 4 shipped with a
>> bunch of versions on the same installation CD, and believe that those
>> included both PowerPC and Alpha.
>>
>
> Pretty sure at least PPC was supported by NT4, but don't quote me.
>
> Also, I think the original NT "personality modules" included OS/2 (but
>> without Presentation Manager, the OS/2 GUI, so it only supported
>> text-mode OS/2 applications). The way I recall it, the OS/2 module was
>> a first-class citizen in NT 3.x, relegated to second-class citizen
>> status in NT 4.0 (it was there, but you had to jump through some hoops
>> to get it installed), and dropped with 5.0/2000.
>>
>
> 3.51 and 4.0, at least, both had a paid add-on for PM application support.
>

3.51 had MIPS support too, though that appears to have been dropped in 4.0.
I don't have my NT disks anymore to go check on that detail.

Warner
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Wesley Parish]

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On 2/6/18, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Feb 2018, Michael Kjörling wrote:
>
>> Honestly, I think you've got the timeline mixed up. Wikipedia puts the
>> Xbox introduction in 2001, which sounds about right to me. Designing
>> the core of the original Windows NT would be about a decade before
>> that, maybe a little earlier still, around 1990-ish. Around 1990 in
>> terms of game consoles was the Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive
>> (A.K.A. Sega Genesis), which the original Xbox was definitely _not_
>> contemporary with. I _think_ (but could certainly be mistaken about
>> this) that Windows 2000 ("NT 5") was the release that dropped several
>> non-Intel architectures; I'm _almost_ certain that NT 4 shipped with a
>> bunch of versions on the same installation CD, and believe that those
>> included both PowerPC and Alpha.
>
> Pretty sure at least PPC was supported by NT4, but don't quote me.

About a decade ago I had a look at fooling around with NT 4.0 on the
PearPC emulator, but didn't have the time. IIRC, WinNT 4.0 Workstation
CDROMs came with at least PowerPC and MIPS versions; I'm not sure
about the Alpha.

Wesley Parish
>
>> Also, I think the original NT "personality modules" included OS/2 (but
>> without Presentation Manager, the OS/2 GUI, so it only supported
>> text-mode OS/2 applications). The way I recall it, the OS/2 module was
>> a first-class citizen in NT 3.x, relegated to second-class citizen
>> status in NT 4.0 (it was there, but you had to jump through some hoops
>> to get it installed), and dropped with 5.0/2000.
>
> 3.51 and 4.0, at least, both had a paid add-on for PM application support.
>
> -uso.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Angelo Papenhoff]

On 03/02/18, Nemo Nusquam wrote:
> On 02/03/18 19:37, Dan Cross wrote (in part):
> > The design of the original NT kernel was overseen by Dave Cutler, of VMS
> > and RSX-11M fame, and had a very strong and apparent VMS influence. Some
> > VAX wizards I know told me that they saw a lot of VMS in NT's design,
> > but that it probably wasn't as good (different design goals, etc:
> > apparently Gates wanted DOS++ and a quick time to market; Cutler wanted
> > to do a *real* OS and they compromised to wind up with VMS--).
> 
> I recall that Cutler wanted a portable OS and had a cli version running 
> on MIPS first.  Eventually, Gates ordered a GUI "bolted on" and things 
> went bad.
> 

You seem to be simplifying things...

Windows NT was originally called NT OS/2 and was supposed to be a 32
bit OS with OS/2 compatibility. The name "NT" comes from codename of the
processor they initially targetted, the i860 aka N-Ten.
When they got the physical hardware they were disappointed by its poor
performace and switched to MIPS instead, other ports followed.
When the Windows GUI became more and more popular (at the expense of
OS/2), they renamed it to Windows NT, but still shipped it with the OS/2
subsystem. The other subsystems were Win32 (an updated version of the
original 16 bit Windows API for the NT kernel) and POSIX.
None of these APIs is native to NT, they're implemented on top of it.
I think only at boot you can run code that uses the NT API directly.

At some point they moved some graphical things into the kernel that were
in user space originally (I don't know what exactly), this was done for
performance reasons. Perhaps that's what you meant with the "bolted on"
GUI.

aap

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[arnold]

The best description of the development of Windows NT, in my opinion,
is the book "Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and
the Next Generation at Microsoft" by G. Pascal Zachary:
https://www.amazon.com/Showstopper-Breakneck-Windows-Generation-Microsoft/dp/1497638836/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1517753530&sr=8-1

Although Amazon gives it a 2014 publication date it is much older.

Well worth reading.

Arnold

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Ron Natalie]

> None of these APIs is native to NT, they're implemented on top of it.
> I think only at boot you can run code that uses the NT API directly.
Amusingly, I have a device in my airplane that runs NT4 without any Windows
graphical API on it.   You can see the thing printing the NT4 startup and
build number when you power it on and it will BSOD.
I actually worked with the n10 and i860.   IBM build a 4 processor i860
card.   We ported the 370/386 AIX to it.
The only non x86 chip I worked with NT on was the iTanium (or as we called
it the iTanic).   I might have had an NT Alpha around but we pretty much
were an OSF/1 shop at the time.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dan Cross]

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:21 PM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> > None of these APIs is native to NT, they're implemented on top of it.
> > I think only at boot you can run code that uses the NT API directly.
> Amusingly, I have a device in my airplane that runs NT4 without any Windows
> graphical API on it.   You can see the thing printing the NT4 startup and
> build number when you power it on and it will BSOD.
>

BSOD on an airplane? That sounds kind of scary.

One time I was poking around a US Navy landing craft after coming off an
amphibious assault ship and somehow found myself down in the engine room.
The computer controlling either the engines or the screws was running some
variant of Windows. It wasn't my bailiwick at the time (I was a Marine
officer; I wasn't even *supposed* to be there ... but I was curious and
pretty much had the run of the boat as long as I didn't touch anything) but
it sort of scared me.

I actually worked with the n10 and i860.   IBM build a 4 processor i860
> card.   We ported the 370/386 AIX to it.
>

That actually sounds kind of cool.

The only non x86 chip I worked with NT on was the iTanium (or as we called
> it the iTanic).   I might have had an NT Alpha around but we pretty much
> were an OSF/1 shop at the time.


I think it was Lockheed Martin that ended up buying a ton of Alphas to run
NT for Exchange server. Shoulda stuck with sendmail....

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Nemo]

On 04/02/2018, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> One time I was poking around a US Navy landing craft after coming off an
> amphibious assault ship and somehow found myself down in the engine room.
> The computer controlling either the engines or the screws was running some
> variant of Windows. ...] but it sort of scared me.

You can google "Windows for warships" on The Register for more
frightening stuff.

N.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 1:55 PM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 04/02/2018, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> > One time I was poking around a US Navy landing craft after coming off an
> > amphibious assault ship and somehow found myself down in the engine room.
> > The computer controlling either the engines or the screws was running
> some
> > variant of Windows. ...] but it sort of scared me.
>
> You can google "Windows for warships" on The Register for more
> frightening stuff.
>

And also https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.88.html

Warner
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Jon Steinhart]

Nemo writes:
> You can google "Windows for warships" on The Register for more
> frightening stuff.
> 
> N.

It's not just Windows.  I remember touring a Navy ship in the early
days of Ethernet and noticed that they were using stinger taps on
the coax.  What could possibly go wrong?

Jon

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Clem Cole]

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Funny, I was just going to respond with my story about the USS Carl Vincent
- a carrier the USA built in the late 1970s.  When the Navy laid its keel,
the White House was running Alto's donated by Xerox.   The Captain had seen
them and wanted then for his new ship and wanted the CIC to be the most
modern imagined.   Xerox did not sell them (and the Star had not been done
yet), so they were sent to the CMU spin off 3 Rivers Computer (aka Triple
Drip) to purchase 'PascAltos' ) later renamed the Perq instead.   We had a
contract at Mellon to make they work as well as a bunch of programming.
We had designed the deployment with pre-cut ethernet cable (3Com
transceivers) that did not use the 'stinger' technology, but fixed cable
lengths, pre-cut and tested before installation.  But the Captain would
have none of it, he had seen the fact that the taps could be moved and he
wants the stinger types.

The deployment happen after I had graduated and left, so I never knew how
that worked out in practice, but years sailing small boats, I just could
not imagine that being reliable.

Clem
ᐧ

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 3:59 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:

> Nemo writes:
> > You can google "Windows for warships" on The Register for more
> > frightening stuff.
> >
> > N.
>
> It's not just Windows.  I remember touring a Navy ship in the early
> days of Ethernet and noticed that they were using stinger taps on
> the coax.  What could possibly go wrong?
>
> Jon
>
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[William Cheswick]

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One important and sensitive site chose to stick with this technology for a while because
one could detect unauthorized taps.  I guess TDR isn’t as useful these days.

> On 4Feb 2018, at 3:59 PM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> It's not just Windows.  I remember touring a Navy ship in the early
> days of Ethernet and noticed that they were using stinger taps on
> the coax.  What could possibly go wrong?

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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, William Cheswick wrote:

> One important and sensitive site chose to stick with this technology for 
> a while becauseone could detect unauthorized taps.  I guess TDR isn’t as 
> useful these days.

I believe that optical TDRs exist, for use on fibre.  The ultimate in 
anti-snooping, of course, is quantum; if you so much as *look* at it, 
you've disturbed it (which is how quantum key exchange would work etc).

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

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Toby Thain]

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On 2018-02-04 3:05 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:21 PM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com
> <mailto:ron at ronnatalie.com>> wrote:
> 
>     > None of these APIs is native to NT, they're implemented on top of it.
>     > I think only at boot you can run code that uses the NT API directly.
>     Amusingly, I have a device in my airplane that runs NT4 without any
>     Windows
>     graphical API on it.   You can see the thing printing the NT4
>     startup and
>     build number when you power it on and it will BSOD.
> 
> 
> BSOD on an airplane? That sounds kind of scary.
> 
> One time I was poking around a US Navy landing craft after coming off an
> amphibious assault ship and somehow found myself down in the engine
> room. The computer controlling either the engines or the screws was
> running some variant of Windows. It wasn't my bailiwick at the time (I
> was a Marine officer; I wasn't even *supposed* to be there ... but I was
> curious and pretty much had the run of the boat as long as I didn't
> touch anything) but it sort of scared me.

You might remember this:
https://www.wired.com/1998/07/sunk-by-windows-nt/

--Toby

> 
>     I actually worked with the n10 and i860.   IBM build a 4 processor i860
>     card.   We ported the 370/386 AIX to it.
> 
> 
> That actually sounds kind of cool.
> 
>     The only non x86 chip I worked with NT on was the iTanium (or as we
>     called
>     it the iTanic).   I might have had an NT Alpha around but we pretty much
>     were an OSF/1 shop at the time.
> 
> 
> I think it was Lockheed Martin that ended up buying a ton of Alphas to
> run NT for Exchange server. Shoulda stuck with sendmail....
> 
>         - Dan C.
> 

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Andy Kosela]

On Sunday, February 4, 2018, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:

> On 2018-02-04 3:05 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> > On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 12:21 PM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com
> > <mailto:ron at ronnatalie.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     > None of these APIs is native to NT, they're implemented on top of
> it.
> >     > I think only at boot you can run code that uses the NT API
> directly.
> >     Amusingly, I have a device in my airplane that runs NT4 without any
> >     Windows
> >     graphical API on it.   You can see the thing printing the NT4
> >     startup and
> >     build number when you power it on and it will BSOD.
> >
> >
> > BSOD on an airplane? That sounds kind of scary.
> >
> > One time I was poking around a US Navy landing craft after coming off an
> > amphibious assault ship and somehow found myself down in the engine
> > room. The computer controlling either the engines or the screws was
> > running some variant of Windows. It wasn't my bailiwick at the time (I
> > was a Marine officer; I wasn't even *supposed* to be there ... but I was
> > curious and pretty much had the run of the boat as long as I didn't
> > touch anything) but it sort of scared me.
>
> You might remember this:
> https://www.wired.com/1998/07/sunk-by-windows-nt/
>
>
I like the following part from this article:

"Vendors including Oracle, Informix, and Computer Associates have
_recently_ announced plans to support Linux".

No mention of *BSD systems which were also open source at the time.

This was the beginning of the decline of *BSD systems in the server market
and it was 20 years ago.  Things went much more downhill since then...

--Andy
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, Dan Cross wrote:

>       Amusingly, I have a device in my airplane that runs NT4 without
>       any Windows graphical API on it.   You can see the thing printing
>       the NT4 startup and build number when you power it on and it will
>       BSOD.
> 
> BSOD on an airplane? That sounds kind of scary.

Dunno if you're joking or not, but if you're serious then yes, NT starts 
up with a nice bright blue screen and some gibberish, and to log on you 
have to "CTL/ALT/DEL".  Yes, really...  I did not endear myself to my 
Windoze-loving cow-orkers when I commented that a) it comes with its own 
BSOD, and b) you have to reboot it to log on.

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

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[George Michaelson]

I did some weak-mode due diligence on the infrastructure side of
DirecTV for a potential user/ISP in Australia. This was in the 90s.

The TDM sat control logic, the box which fed the Hughes aerospace low
level protocol to tell the satellite which user got which timeslots,
was OS/2 -I glibly assumed this was initially a typo, and then when I
confirmed it, checked it was under maintenance, and indeed it was. it
continued to be an actively maintained product until 2006 according to
wookiepedia when I read it just now. (it is a little hard to read, but
google translate works) So this idea that all good ideas die, and get
replaced by bad Microsoft ideas even then, wasn't strictly true:
People chose to run systems which worked for them, and if the backend
support contracts works, continued to run then way way after they
"died" in the visible marketplace.

So back then, I shrugged and said "it seems ok. it works, its very
small, very fast, has sensible logic behind it, and its a shitload
better than windows". We weren't going to interact with this OS/2,
somehow they'd sent me the uplink control manual for a consumer
internet service we'd resell at arms length: we'd send emails to
Hughes staff, who would issue the commands, to configure the customers
live (the customer side squareial antenna was designed for anyone,
even army PFCs to configure: you line of sight it to north, then
hunt-and-check until the whistle said it was on-target. It think the
TV could even be a ring-and-dot focus thing checking side-channel SQ
to confirm when it was lined up. Then tighten the wall bolts, and its
done. Oh right. Did I say north? I'm southern hemisphere. you guys
line it south...)

Looking back, I don't know what I expected the OS behind this thing to
be. Probably, some arcane military-industrial (BESM compatible? Never
know when you might sell one to the other side...) protocol designed
to cause ICBM to be launched, with Bruce Willis on it riding bareback
to wrestle the sat dish into place. Or punch cards. Or maybe you phone
Hughes and they type it into a 1960s batch control system on their own
fruitbat powered analog computer.

Or .. OS/2? why not. That works. DECISION!

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 8:43 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, Dan Cross wrote:
>
>>       Amusingly, I have a device in my airplane that runs NT4 without
>>       any Windows graphical API on it.   You can see the thing printing
>>       the NT4 startup and build number when you power it on and it will
>>       BSOD.
>>
>> BSOD on an airplane? That sounds kind of scary.
>
>
> Dunno if you're joking or not, but if you're serious then yes, NT starts up
> with a nice bright blue screen and some gibberish, and to log on you have to
> "CTL/ALT/DEL".  Yes, really...  I did not endear myself to my Windoze-loving
> cow-orkers when I commented that a) it comes with its own BSOD, and b) you
> have to reboot it to log on.
>
> --
> Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will
> suffer."

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Ron Natalie]

I'm serious.   The thing never gets to the login screen (and I'm quite familiar with it, I was a beta NT user when it was first released.    The fact that it asked you to type CTL-ALT-DEL to login was so bizarre I took a photo of the screen).

The thing gets the "blue" start up screen with the build number (oddly, on my unit the video screen is upside down as far as NT is concerned so it's upside down).   While the software that runs under NT which is the heart of the system hides everything else, I have seen it blue screen on a few occasions.    

I've looked at the file system it boots off.   Not much there.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dan Cross]

On Sun, Feb 4, 2018 at 5:43 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, Dan Cross wrote:
>
>>       Amusingly, I have a device in my airplane that runs NT4 without
>>       any Windows graphical API on it.   You can see the thing printing
>>       the NT4 startup and build number when you power it on and it will
>>       BSOD.
>>
>> BSOD on an airplane? That sounds kind of scary.
>>
>
> Dunno if you're joking or not, but if you're serious then yes, NT starts
> up with a nice bright blue screen and some gibberish, and to log on you
> have to "CTL/ALT/DEL".  Yes, really...  I did not endear myself to my
> Windoze-loving cow-orkers when I commented that a) it comes with its own
> BSOD, and b) you have to reboot it to log on.


If by BSOD you mean, "Blue Screen of Death", which was NT's crash-dump
indicator then yes: I'm totally serious. I'd find a computer crashing on an
airplane frightening (I mean, I'm imagining that it does something
important).

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[William Cheswick]

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> On 4Feb 2018, at 10:40 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> If by BSOD you mean, "Blue Screen of Death", which was NT's crash-dump indicator then yes: I'm totally serious. I'd find a computer crashing on an airplane frightening (I mean, I'm imagining that it does something important).

Save design would have the plane controls on a completely air-gapped network from the
entertainment stuff.  I was told that they don’t, because the captain needs to be able to
stop the entertainment system during an announcement.  I could build them a very simple gateway
that transmits UDP packets in one direction only, that would meet this, and related needs.

There have been hacks of the avionics reported from the entertainment network.  It is scary,
if true, and bush league IMO.

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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Ron Natalie]

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The unit, the MX20 is really nothing more than a supporting instrument.   It can bring up charts and other information but obviously there are backups.

Indeed, it has given me the (upside down) blue screen of death.   It’s also auto rebooted itself a few times for errors it caught (either watchdog timer or user-mode protection faults).

The thing is kind of memory starved I think and really involved weather radar downloads tend to crash the thing.

 

I’ve done some other stuff in planes, not related to flight systems.    We built up a couple of image systems and one situation monitor, and later video gear.  There’s rules for what goes in planes (at least for the military).   We used some real time Linux variants at times.

 

I did actually interview with GE right out of college to work on the 767 flight controls.    Now that is some scary bit of software.   There were two units, if one fails, the other takes over.   If both fails, it writes the error code into non-volatile memory so it can be retrieved from the wreckage.

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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Mon, 5 Feb 2018, William Cheswick wrote:

> There have been hacks of the avionics reported from the entertainment 
> network.  It is scary, if true, and bush league IMO.

There's certainly been demonstrations of vehicles being taken over via the 
entertainment system; why the stereo needs to talk to the engine computer 
I'll never know...  I know, wind up the volume the faster you go etc, but 
surely it ought to be one-way?

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

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Ron Natalie]

I've not seen that in an airplane.   I'd like a cite.
There's certainly issues with the computers in some of the later things (like my Volt which is just a rolling computer.   The transmission lever and the gas pedals are just inputs to the computer.   They don't directly control things.   Even the first bit of brake travel is purely a software input).

-----Original Message-----
From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Dave Horsfall
Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 4:52 PM
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

On Mon, 5 Feb 2018, William Cheswick wrote:

> There have been hacks of the avionics reported from the entertainment 
> network.  It is scary, if true, and bush league IMO.

There's certainly been demonstrations of vehicles being taken over via the entertainment system; why the stereo needs to talk to the engine computer I'll never know...  I know, wind up the volume the faster you go etc, but surely it ought to be one-way?

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

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Grant Taylor]

On 02/05/2018 02:57 PM, Ron Natalie wrote:
> I've not seen that in an airplane.   I'd like a cite.

I don't have any citations.

I do remember in the last few years hearing about two distinct events:

1)  A passenger purportedly took over an airplane while while in flight 
momentarily.  I vaguely remember something about altering thrust to one 
engine for a brief time frame before returning it to where it was, and 
then doing the same with the other engine.

2)  A control research condition by authorities, FBI, FAA, I don't know, 
reproducing #1 above.

I believe both seemed plausible from what I remember.

Sorry, I don't have anything more specific.  Someone with better search 
skills than me can probably turn up news articles on both events.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Arthur Krewat]

Literally, googled "hacker controlled plane engine"

https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight-computer-systems/index.html



On 2/5/2018 5:31 PM, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
> Someone with better search skills than me can probably turn up news 
> articles on both events.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Grant Taylor]

On 02/05/2018 04:16 PM, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> Literally, googled "hacker controlled plane engine"

I tried that as well.

I was getting to many "A Pope" type collisions (ala "The Da Vinci Code").

I have no idea what I've done to my Google search results on this 
machine.  I think it's time to reset them.

> https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight-computer-systems/index.html 

Yep, that's the first one that I was talking about.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Ron Natalie]

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I find the story hard to believe.    A "CLB" command causes the engines to make the airplane climb?    It doesn’t work that way.
I'm a little familiar with the 757 autothrottles and the overall Airbus logic (if you think a modern UNIX OS looks bizarrely complex, take a look at Airbus "flight law" sometimes);.

-----Original Message-----
From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Arthur Krewat
Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 6:17 PM
To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

Literally, googled "hacker controlled plane engine"

https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight-computer-systems/index.html



On 2/5/2018 5:31 PM, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
> Someone with better search skills than me can probably turn up news 
> articles on both events.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Arthur Krewat]

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Maybe the autopilot? Still, overly simplistic.


On 2/6/2018 12:42 PM, Ron Natalie wrote:
> I find the story hard to believe.    A "CLB" command causes the engines to make the airplane climb?    It doesn’t work that way.
> I'm a little familiar with the 757 autothrottles and the overall Airbus logic (if you think a modern UNIX OS looks bizarrely complex, take a look at Airbus "flight law" sometimes);.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces at minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Arthur Krewat
> Sent: Monday, February 5, 2018 6:17 PM
> To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)
>
> Literally, googled "hacker controlled plane engine"
>
> https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight-computer-systems/index.html
>
>
>
> On 2/5/2018 5:31 PM, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
>> Someone with better search skills than me can probably turn up news
>> articles on both events.
>
>
>

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Charles Anthony]

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On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 1:57 PM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> I've not seen that in an airplane.   I'd like a cite.
>

comp.risks:



Interconnection of Three Previously Separated Networks in Boeing 737

Joe Loughry <joe.loughry at stx.ox.ac.uk>

Wed, 11 Jun 2014 19:06:37 +0000

"Special Conditions" refers to the fact that certification rules haven't

kept pace. The three network domains (aircraft control, operator

information, and passenger entertainment) used to run on physically separate

wires, primarily for historical reasons, but having obvious engineering

benefits as well. In recent years, first the computers and now the networks

have migrated to virtual machine separation on shared hardware, for the

equally obvious space, weight, and power savings. The *Federal Register*

rule published this week mentions interconnection between at least two of

the three domains; I hope they paid close attention to UC Berkeley's

"Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile" (2010).


> https://federalregister.gov/a/2014-13244


> Source: "Special Conditions: The Boeing Company, Models 737-700, -700C,

-800, -900ER, -7, -8, and -9 Series Airplanes; Airplane Electronic Systems

Security Protection From Unauthorized External Access" [*Federal Register*

vol. 79, no. 109, June 6, 2014, pp. 32640-32641].


> Joe Loughry, Doctoral Student in the Department of Computer Science

St Cross College, Oxford



and

Banned Researcher Commandeered a Plane (Kim Zetter)
>
> "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann at csl.sri.com>
>
> Fri, 15 May 2015 21:12:42 PDT
>
>   (Courtesy of Dan Farmer: Fly the unfriendly skies?)
>
>
>> Kim Zetter, Feds Say That Banned Researcher Commandeered a Plane
>
> http://www.wired.com/2015/05/feds-say-banned-researcher-commandeered-plane/
>
>
>> A security researcher kicked off a United Airlines flight last month after
>
> tweeting about security vulnerabilities in its system had previously taken
>
> control of an airplane and caused it to briefly fly sideways, according to
>
> an application for a search warrant filed by an FBI agent.
>
>
>> Chris Roberts, a security researcher with One World Labs, told the FBI
>> agent
>
> during an interview in February that he had hacked the in-flight
>
> entertainment system, or IFE, on an airplane and overwrote code on the
>
> plane's Thrust Management Computer while aboard the flight. He was able to
>
> issue a climb command and make the plane briefly change course, the
>> document
>
> states.
>
>
>> FBI Special Agent Mark Hurley: “He stated that he thereby caused one of
>> the
>
> airplane engines to climb resulting in a lateral or sideways movement of
>> the
>
> plane during one of these flights, He also stated that he used Vortex
>
> software after comprising/exploiting or hacking the airplane's networks. He
>
> used the software to monitor traffic from the cockpit system.''
>
>
>> Hurley filed the search warrant application last month after Roberts was
>
> removed from a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Syracuse, New York,
>
> because he published a facetious tweet suggesting he might hack into the
>
> plane's network. Upon landing in Syracuse, two FBI agents and two local
>
> police officers escorted him from the plane and interrogated him for
>> several
>
> hours. They also seized two laptop computers and several hard drives and
>> USB
>
> sticks. Although the agents did not have a warrant when they seized the
>
> devices, they told Roberts a warrant was pending.
>
>
>> A media outlet in Canada obtained the application for the warrant today
>> and
>
> published it online.
>
>
>>
>> http://aptn.ca/news/2015/05/15/hacker-told-f-b-made-plane-fly-sideways-cracking-entertainment-system/
>
>
>> The information outlined in the warrant application reveals a far more
>
> serious situation than Roberts has previously disclosed.
>
>
>> Roberts had previously told WIRED that he caused a plane to climb during a
>
> simulated test on a virtual environment he and a colleague created, but he
>
> insisted that he had not interfered with the operation of a plane while in
>
> flight.
>
>
>> He told WIRED that he did access in-flight networks about 15 times during
>
> various flights but had not done anything beyond explore the networks and
>
> observe data traffic crossing them. According to the FBI affidavit,
>> however,
>
> he mentioned this to agents as well last February but also added that he
>> had
>
> briefly commandeered a plane during one of those flights. He told the FBI
>> he
>
> accessed the flights in which he accessed the in-flight networks more than
>> a
>
> dozen times occurred between 2011 and 2014, but the affidavit does not
>
> indicate exactly which flight he allegedly caused to turn to the side.
>
>
>> He obtained physical access to the networks through the Seat Electronic
>> Box,
>
> or SEB. These are installed two to a row, on each side of the aisle under
>
> passenger seats, on certain planes. After removing the cover to the SEB by
>
> `wiggling and Squeezing the box', Roberts told agents he attached a Cat6
>
> ethernet cable, with a modified connector, to the box and to his laptop and
>
> then used default IDs and passwords to gain access to the inflight
>
> entertainment system. Once on that network, he was able to gain access to
>
> other systems on the planes.
>
>
>> Reaction in the security community to the new revelations in the affidavit
>
> have been harsh. Although Roberts hasn't been charged yet with any
>
> crime, and there are questions about whether his actions really did cause
>
> the plane to list or he simply thought they did, a number of security
>
> researchers have expressed shock that he attempted to tamper with a plane
>
> during a flight.
>
>
>> “I find it really hard to believe but if that is the case he deserves
>> going
>
> to jail,'' wrote Jaime Blasco, director of AlienVault Labs in a tweet.
>
>
>> Alex Stamos, chief information security officer of Yahoo, wrote in a
>> tweet,
>
> “You cannot promote the (true) idea that security research benefits
>
> humanity while defending research that endangered hundreds of innocents.''
>
>
>>   [Wonderful long item truncated for RISKS.  PGN]
>
>
> -- Charles
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Arthur Krewat]

The CAN network is bi-directional, and I don't think it has any 
security. So any node on the CAN can read-write whatever the heck it 
wants to.

Plug in an OBD-II device, and using the right software (like Forscan) 
you can read/write all sorts of locations in the body-control module, 
flash new software into the PCM (powertrain control module), etc.

I suspect that if you have the entertainment system that has the ability 
to read PIDs in the PCM, for example, road speed, that same interface 
could be used to write values as well.

My 2013 Taurus SHO came with Sync 2 - which ran Windows CE. Thankfully, 
it wasn't a "server" and WiFi wasn't enabled. Now my 2016 Taurus SHO has 
Sync 3 running QNX. I am not amused ;)

On 2/5/2018 4:57 PM, Ron Natalie wrote:
> There's certainly been demonstrations of vehicles being taken over via the entertainment system; why the stereo needs to talk to the engine computer I'll never know...  I know, wind up the volume the faster you go etc, but surely it ought to be one-way?

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 5 Feb 2018, Arthur Krewat wrote:

> On 2/5/2018 4:57 PM, Ron Natalie wrote:
>> There's certainly been demonstrations of vehicles being taken over via 
>> the entertainment system; why the stereo needs to talk to the engine 
>> computer I'll never know...  I know, wind up the volume the faster you 
>> go etc, but surely it ought to be one-way?

Umm, I wrote that, not Ron...

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

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Arthur Krewat]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 580 bytes --]

Sorry, Thunderbird strikes again. I highlighted the text to include, and 
it didn't put the correct address on the quote.

My apologies.

On 2/5/2018 6:28 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Feb 2018, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>
>> On 2/5/2018 4:57 PM, Ron Natalie wrote:
>>> There's certainly been demonstrations of vehicles being taken over 
>>> via the entertainment system; why the stereo needs to talk to the 
>>> engine computer I'll never know...  I know, wind up the volume the 
>>> faster you go etc, but surely it ought to be one-way?
>
> Umm, I wrote that, not Ron...
>

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[George Michaelson]

My understanding is that FAA rated 'ethernet' switches for aircraft
are modified ASICs which do TDM. You program in slot reservations, and
this is used to give bounded-time delivery guarantees for flight
critical stuff. Cheaper to make by modifying existing stuff, the
physical and link layer code is almost identical, its just put into a
timeslot regime. Its fully isochronous for the flight control and its
best effort delivery for the entertainment.

So, when people talk about the entertainment being 'isolated' its not
opto-isolated and its not airgap discrete switch isolated: the TDM
bitfield excludes the customers from talking in the timeslots for the
flight control logic.

I think the imputed hack, was to "see" the flight control sequences
because you can probably fake out read-side, and get passive view of
them if you can make the ports broadcast-receive. I am really
unconvinced anyone succeeded in write-mode into this model. Not that
it couldn't happen and not that I believe I'm smarted than bad people:
I just thing the descriptions have the quality of urban myth right
now.



On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 9:36 AM, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:
> Sorry, Thunderbird strikes again. I highlighted the text to include, and it
> didn't put the correct address on the quote.
>
> My apologies.
>
>
> On 2/5/2018 6:28 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 5 Feb 2018, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>>
>>> On 2/5/2018 4:57 PM, Ron Natalie wrote:
>>>>
>>>> There's certainly been demonstrations of vehicles being taken over via
>>>> the entertainment system; why the stereo needs to talk to the engine
>>>> computer I'll never know...  I know, wind up the volume the faster you go
>>>> etc, but surely it ought to be one-way?
>>
>>
>> Umm, I wrote that, not Ron...
>>
>

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

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Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
 |On Mon, 5 Feb 2018, William Cheswick wrote:
 |> There have been hacks of the avionics reported from the entertainment 
 |> network.  It is scary, if true, and bush league IMO.
 |
 |There's certainly been demonstrations of vehicles being taken over via the 
 |entertainment system; why the stereo needs to talk to the engine computer 

I have seen fly-by i think two CVE announcements for BMW.
I can only find one format-string related one via search engine.

 |I'll never know...  I know, wind up the volume the faster you go etc, but 
 |surely it ought to be one-way?

Truly hate that; that job used to be fun with craftsmanship rather
than plugging in a service computer and reading error logs.
I never will forget that film about Rolls Royce in the 80s: one
man, his hammer, a small table with tea right beside the working
place, and three days of work to get a single fender.
I wonder how this will end up when 3-D printers can produce
furniture, clothes, houses and all that.  No real work to be done
anymore, and i do not like Harley-Davidson for having some real
work to do.  (New Moto Guzzi also have CAN-bus i think.)

--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] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> Save design would have the plane controls on a completely air-gapped 
> network from the entertainment stuff.  I was told that they don?t, 
> because the captain needs to be able to stop the entertainment system 
> during an announcement.  I could build them a very simple gateway that 
> transmits UDP packets in one direction only, that would meet this, and 
> related needs.

This doesn't need a network, just a pair of GPIO pins -- an output 
pin on the avionics system, and an input pin on the entertainment system.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dan Cross]

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[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2972 bytes --]

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 8:48 AM, William Cheswick <ches at cheswick.com> wrote:
>
> On 4Feb 2018, at 10:40 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If by BSOD you mean, "Blue Screen of Death", which was NT's crash-dump
> indicator then yes: I'm totally serious. I'd find a computer crashing on an
> airplane frightening (I mean, I'm imagining that it does something
> important).
>
> Save design would have the plane controls on a completely air-gapped
> network from the
> entertainment stuff.  I was told that they don’t, because the captain
> needs to be able to
> stop the entertainment system during an announcement.  I could build them
> a very simple gateway
> that transmits UDP packets in one direction only, that would meet this,
> and related needs.
>
> There have been hacks of the avionics reported from the entertainment
> network.  It is scary,
> if true, and bush league IMO.
>

I'll do you one better: have the PA system for the passenger cabin separate
from the flight control system. Use an ambient mic or an all-analog audio
cable to capture whatever the captain says on the flight recorder (the only
reason I can imagine for wanting the PA system hooked up to the rest of the
flight systems in the first place). Electrically isolated it with a
transformer.

Since Ron's windows computer is just a supporting device and doesn't affect
flight operations, it's much less scary than I had initially imagined:
"Yeah, every now and again the engine BSOD's. Sorta sucks when you're in
mid-air...." "Hmm. You may want a new plane...."

I do remember the Yorktown being dead in the water. I can just picture a
number of various class Petty Officer's and junior sailors running around
hopelessly while a Chief bellowed at them to "get the damned engines back
online!" and officer country turned into a weeping pool of tears, but since
no one knew how a computer works they just couldn't figure it out. Finally
someone radioed back: "send out a tug." Oops.

In respect of Warren's recent gentle nudge to bring the topic back to a
Unix tie-in, I can say that as recently as 2008 I saw an UltraSPARC machine
running Solaris on a big-deck amphib. No idea what it was there for; I have
a vague recollection of seeing a CDE screen.

Also, on a less martial track, one of the things I vividly remember about
the NT introduction were the many dire predictions that this spelled the
imminent death of Unix. NT would sweep all before it into the dustbin of
evolutionary history and Microsoft would achieve total world domination. It
seems that Linux was the rebel alliance to that galactic war, though. I'm
curious what others thought of those predictions: did they even get onto
your radar?

        - Dan C.

(PS to Gregg Levine: thank you for your kind words and you're more than
welcome. :-))
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Nemo Nusquam]

On 02/06/18 16:51, Dan Cross wrote:
> Also, on a less martial track, one of the things I vividly remember
> about the NT introduction were the many dire predictions that this
> spelled the imminent death of Unix. NT would sweep all before it into
> the dustbin of evolutionary history and Microsoft would achieve total
> world domination. It seems that Linux was the rebel alliance to that
> galactic war, though. I'm curious what others thought of those
> predictions: did they even get onto your radar?

I remember attending a Unix International meeting where the mood was one 
of fear and despondency.  I thought their attitude insane but the few I 
spoke with thought that NT would take over the world.  (I encountered 
the same at a satnav meeting.  Motorola's satellites were in orbit -- I 
forgot the name of the actual venture -- and MS had just paired with 
somebody to put their own satellites up.  Fear everywhere.)

N.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 4:14 PM, Nemo Nusquam <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 02/06/18 16:51, Dan Cross wrote:
>
>> Also, on a less martial track, one of the things I vividly remember
>> about the NT introduction were the many dire predictions that this
>> spelled the imminent death of Unix. NT would sweep all before it into
>> the dustbin of evolutionary history and Microsoft would achieve total
>> world domination. It seems that Linux was the rebel alliance to that
>> galactic war, though. I'm curious what others thought of those
>> predictions: did they even get onto your radar?
>>
>
> I remember attending a Unix International meeting where the mood was one
> of fear and despondency.  I thought their attitude insane but the few I
> spoke with thought that NT would take over the world.  (I encountered the
> same at a satnav meeting.  Motorola's satellites were in orbit -- I forgot
> the name of the actual venture -- and MS had just paired with somebody to
> put their own satellites up.  Fear everywhere.)


Wasn't that Iridium? A joint venture with Qualcomm, IIRC.
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dave Horsfall]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 510 bytes --]

On Tue, 6 Feb 2018, Warner Losh wrote:

>       Motorola's satellites were in orbit -- I forgot the name of the
>       actual venture -- and MS had just paired with somebody to put
>       their own satellites up.  Fear everywhere.)
> 
> Wasn't that Iridium? A joint venture with Qualcomm, IIRC.

Shouldn't that be called "Osmium"[*] now? :-)

[*]
Interesting metal, osmium; stinks to high heaven, just like... never mind.

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

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 6 Feb 2018, Dan Cross wrote:

> Also, on a less martial track, one of the things I vividly remember 
> about the NT introduction were the many dire predictions that this 
> spelled the imminent death of Unix. [...]

I remember when Pick was going to be the imminent death of Unix...  And 
wasn't BeOS going to be, too?  I've been mucking about with Unix since 
Edition 5, and I've seen all the predictions.

Unix may not be recognisable in the future, but it's here to stay.

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

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Clem Cole]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 331 bytes --]

On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 8:23 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

>
>
> Unix may not be recognisable in the future, but it's here to stay.

​+1​
ᐧ
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 8:23 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Feb 2018, Dan Cross wrote:
>
>> Also, on a less martial track, one of the things I vividly remember about
>> the NT introduction were the many dire predictions that this spelled the
>> imminent death of Unix. [...]
>>
>
> I remember when Pick was going to be the imminent death of Unix...  And
> wasn't BeOS going to be, too?  I've been mucking about with Unix since
> Edition 5, and I've seen all the predictions.
>
> Unix may not be recognisable in the future, but it's here to stay.
>

Oh, certainly "NT Takes Over the World!" didn't happen, and in retrospect
it seems somewhat naive that anyone ever thought that it would; let alone
that it would put Unix into the grave. But those doomsday predictions
seemed very much to be the order of the day.

Interestingly, I saw a lot of what was left of the minicomputer
infrastructure around the campus I haunted (but bear in mind I was in high
school at the time so had a weird perspective as an outside-insider) as
well as a lot of mainframe stuff get replaced by NT. The Unix folks
(especially those at the centralized computing facility) pretty much had
the attitude that, "well, we're next..." but that never came to pass. But
much VMS, whatever HP minicomputer stuff was floating around (MPE?) and all
VM/CMS (I guess it was actually VM/ESA by that time) disappeared;
VAXstations, serial terminals and 3179G's were all replaced by PCs running
Windows and the users were replaced by these smiling robots. It was weird.

Somehow, most of the Unix people managed to escape. I wonder why? Part of
my sense is that by and large the Unix people were more technically adept
than the minicomputer and mainframe people, though to this day one of *the*
most technically astute hackers I've ever seen was a diehard VMS guy. He
came from TOPS-10 on the PDP-10, though, so maybe that's why. But certainly
the median level of technical "clue" was higher amongst the Unix folks than
the other communities. I wonder if that wasn't one of the primary factors
that enabled folks to stay outside of the NT gravitational pull.

I wonder, too, if Unix networking didn't play a major role. I have this dim
sense that NT was designed for a world in which it was still assumed that
the OSI suite was going to win the networking wars. When, almost to
everyone's surprise, the Internet ended up taking off Unix was already
well-positioned to respond and NT had to play catch up.

I remember going to lunch one afternoon (I guess it was the summer because
I didn't have school) and everyone was sitting around complaining about how
horrible Microsoft was. One of the older sysadmins said something like,
"you know, I can remember saying the exact same things about IBM 15 years
ago. Now it's Microsoft. They won't last." I was rather incredulous that
the enemy was not being recognized, let alone actively resisted. But in the
end, he was absolutely right, and in retrospect it makes perfect sense: the
price of hardware is being asymptotically driven to zero; given that,
software cost becomes significant, giving rise to things like Linux as
commercially viable alternatives to proprietary software. Given that, MS
never stood a chance of long term dominance. Of course, as software cost
goes to zero than the maintenance and other ongoing costs (space, power,
etc) tend to dominate, giving rise to the cloud, etc.

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Tony Finch]

Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> [...] But much VMS, whatever HP minicomputer stuff was floating around
> (MPE?) and all VM/CMS (I guess it was actually VM/ESA by that time)
> disappeared; VAXstations, serial terminals and 3179G's were all replaced
> by PCs running Windows and the users were replaced by these smiling
> robots. It was weird.
>
> Somehow, most of the Unix people managed to escape. I wonder why? [...]
>
> I wonder, too, if Unix networking didn't play a major role. I have this dim
> sense that NT was designed for a world in which it was still assumed that
> the OSI suite was going to win the networking wars. [...]

I was in my late teens around that time but I got the impression that in
the early to mid 1990s when this shift was happening, networking was
moving to IP and all the IP software was Unix - certainly it was the only
option if you wanted to run network services at the scale of a University
or ISP. At the same time Windows was all about workgroup-scale office
networking. I don't think their network protocols were OSI but Exchange
was based on X.400 and to this day still only does Internet mail
grudgingly.

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/  -  I xn--zr8h punycode
Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea: West or southwest 4 or 5, increasing 6 at times.
Slight or moderate, occasionally rough except in Irish Sea, becoming very
rough later in southwest Fastnet. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Wesley Parish]

MS/PC/DR DOS networks used Novell Netware's IPX/SPX suite iirc. Then
IBM and Microsoft came up with NetBIOS and its development NetBEUI, a
simple peer-to-peer network, and MS Windows 3.11 for Workgroups
standardized on that, which meant that most small/er networks
defaulted to NetBEUI.

Then the Internet took off and TCP/IP took over the networking;
NetBEUI survived in the form of Samba as a protocol suite for printer
sharing.

Microsoft had thought it would take over from other public computer
networks like Compuserve with its MSN, but the Internet made all of
them subnets to itself.

Wesley Parish

On 2/8/18, Tony Finch <dot at dotat.at> wrote:
> Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> [...] But much VMS, whatever HP minicomputer stuff was floating around
>> (MPE?) and all VM/CMS (I guess it was actually VM/ESA by that time)
>> disappeared; VAXstations, serial terminals and 3179G's were all replaced
>> by PCs running Windows and the users were replaced by these smiling
>> robots. It was weird.
>>
>> Somehow, most of the Unix people managed to escape. I wonder why? [...]
>>
>> I wonder, too, if Unix networking didn't play a major role. I have this
>> dim
>> sense that NT was designed for a world in which it was still assumed that
>> the OSI suite was going to win the networking wars. [...]
>
> I was in my late teens around that time but I got the impression that in
> the early to mid 1990s when this shift was happening, networking was
> moving to IP and all the IP software was Unix - certainly it was the only
> option if you wanted to run network services at the scale of a University
> or ISP. At the same time Windows was all about workgroup-scale office
> networking. I don't think their network protocols were OSI but Exchange
> was based on X.400 and to this day still only does Internet mail
> grudgingly.
>
> Tony.
> --
> f.anthony.n.finch  <dot at dotat.at>  http://dotat.at/  -  I xn--zr8h punycode
> Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea: West or southwest 4 or 5, increasing 6 at times.
> Slight or moderate, occasionally rough except in Irish Sea, becoming very
> rough later in southwest Fastnet. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor.
>

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Bakul Shah]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1538 bytes --]



> On Feb 6, 2018, at 5:54 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> But much VMS, whatever HP minicomputer stuff was floating around (MPE?) and all VM/CMS (I guess it was actually VM/ESA by that time) disappeared; VAXstations, serial terminals and 3179G's were all replaced by PCs running Windows and the users were replaced by these smiling robots. It was weird.

“Attack of the killer micros”! Anyone remember Eugene Brooks’ 1989 comp.arch
article? Brooks was talking about this in relation to supercomputers but the killer
micros first killed the minicomputer market.

> Somehow, most of the Unix people managed to escape.
...
> I wonder, too, if Unix networking didn't play a major role. I have this dim sense that NT was designed for a world in which it was still assumed that the OSI suite was going to win the networking wars. When, almost to everyone's surprise, the Internet ended up taking off Unix was already well-positioned to respond and NT had to play catch up.

In 1994 or so, a friend who had been at Microsoft for many years tried
to convince me that Windows networking was going to win. Microsoft’s
reality distortion field being very strong in Redmond, he simply couldn’t
see how windows networking would *not* succeed (I saw similar RDF
effects at other big companies). A week late Bill Gates announced
Windows will  fully support IP.  By then most of the internet related services
were already running  on unix. And anyone technically savvy could bring
Linux or BSD for free on an inexpensive PC.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 7 Feb 2018, at 01:54, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Oh, certainly "NT Takes Over the World!" didn't happen, and in retrospect it seems somewhat naive that anyone ever thought that it would; let alone that it would put Unix into the grave. But those doomsday predictions seemed very much to be the order of the day.

Sometime around 1994 someone asked me to write a document explaining why Linux (or, perhaps Unix in general) was so much better than NT to make some business case.  I got a copy of NT (3.x) and an NT design book (I'm not sure which one but there probably only was one at the time), read the book and declined to write the article, because I thought that NT would probably win, much to my dismay.  I think my reasoning was that people would care about security and NT actually had a security architecture which Unix really didn't.

Obviously I should have taken the money.

--tim

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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Kurt H Maier]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1419 bytes --]

On Sun, Feb 04, 2018 at 03:05:11PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
     
>
> I think it was Lockheed Martin that ended up buying a ton of Alphas to run   
> NT for Exchange server. Shoulda stuck with sendmail....
>
                                           
With the advent of mail.mil, the entire DoD is on Exchange now.  Sure,
it sucks, but since there's no way to get equivalent functionality with
actual technical support for anything else, I'm not sure what anyone
expected. Until something like Red Hat, but with a willingness to address 
customer needs, comes around, it's going to be the same old story, ad 
infinitum.
                                           
That said, I've worked in a couple of DSRC sites, and at least one of
them explicitly considers Windows a security risk... but they still have
to keep workstations around because of the tight integration of the
Exchange ecosystem.  I don't know of anyone happy with the current 
situation.                         
                                           
At least ARL (née BRL, of course) still has a healthy awareness of the
architectural ins and outs of UNIX, if only they could get the free hand
to innovate in that space.         

It's the classic problem both inside and outside the military:  if too
many technical people turn down the management routes, you get paths
forward that don't involve any technical considerations...
 
       
khm

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Robert Brockway]

On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, Angelo Papenhoff wrote:

> At some point they moved some graphical things into the kernel that were
> in user space originally (I don't know what exactly), this was done for
> performance reasons. Perhaps that's what you meant with the "bolted on"
> GUI.

I watched the development of NT during that period and I recall that 
graphics was originally in ring 1 on i386 until NT 3.51.  From NT 4 
onwards graphics drivers were moved to ring 0 (the kernel).

I believe this push came from the marketting department.  Moar speed!

Cheers,

Rob

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Donald ODona]

At 4 Feb 2018 00:39:36 +0000 (+00:00) from Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com>:
> On Sat, Feb 3, 2018 at 5:59 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:

> The design of the original NT kernel was overseen by Dave Cutler, of VMS
> and RSX-11M fame, and had a very strong and apparent VMS influence. Some
> VAX wizards I know told me that they saw a lot of VMS in NT's design, but
> that it probably wasn't as good (different design goals, etc: apparently
> Gates wanted DOS++ and a quick time to market; Cutler wanted to do a *real*
> OS and they compromised to wind up with VMS--).

Win32/WinNT basically is OS2 Release 3, with IBM as customer and principal leader. 
Release 3 was OS/2 portable running on more that Intel X86. Furthermore MS hired
a Mach developer for NT Kernel, which, like all micro kernels, started as micro kernel
and soon became a hybrid out of good reasons.
Cutler contribution to Windows is largely overrated, because all these rumors of a VMS
heritage serve MS as a marketing campaign to compete against *NIX, because of VMS
reputation as very stable and secure OS. In real Windows has nothing to do with
VMS. Cutler and his team were hired after DEC stopped the mica project out of good
reasons. Windows has a lot to do with OS/2 and IBM is responsible for it. Without
the expertise of IBM MS surely would have build windows GUI upon xenix. Remember
xenix was MS unix and the most wide spread UNIX of the 80ths. 

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sat, 3 Feb 2018, Dan Cross wrote:

> The colonel kept asking me why I didn't run Windows: "but it's the most 
> popular operating system in the world!" Actually, I suspect Linux and 
> BSD in the guise of iOS/macOS is running on a lot more devices than 
> Windows at this point. I didn't bother pointing that out to him.

I'm told that Android (Linux?) outnumbers iOS (BSD?) quite heavily in the 
mobile market; Win/CE (pronounced "wince") never really took off.

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

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Bakul Shah]

On Mon, 05 Feb 2018 10:25:35 +1100 Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Feb 2018, Dan Cross wrote:
> 
> > The colonel kept asking me why I didn't run Windows: "but it's the most 
> > popular operating system in the world!" Actually, I suspect Linux and 
> > BSD in the guise of iOS/macOS is running on a lot more devices than 
> > Windows at this point. I didn't bother pointing that out to him.
> 
> I'm told that Android (Linux?) outnumbers iOS (BSD?) quite heavily in the 
> mobile market; Win/CE (pronounced "wince") never really took off.

Depends on which market you look at.  In the desktop/laptop
world Windows is still the king.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Market_share_by_category

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Dave Horsfall]

On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, Bakul Shah wrote:

>> I'm told that Android (Linux?) outnumbers iOS (BSD?) quite heavily in 
>> the mobile market; Win/CE (pronounced "wince") never really took off.
>
> Depends on which market you look at.  In the desktop/laptop world 
> Windows is still the king.

I said the *mobile* market.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Market_share_by_category

Which is exactly what I said...

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

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Robert Brockway]

On Sat, 3 Feb 2018, Dan Cross wrote:

> Now days, I understand that one can run Linux binaries natively; the
> Linux-compatibility subsystem will even `apt-get install` dependencies for
> you. Satya Nadella's company isn't your father's Microsoft anymore. VSCode
> (their new snazzy editor that apparently all the kids love) is Open Source.

It's interesting that this hasn't taken off more.  A year+ on and I hardly 
see anyone using it.

> The speculation of, "what would have happened?" is interesting, though of
> course unanswerable. I suspect that had it not been for Unix, we'd all be
> running software that was closer to what you'd find on a mainframe or RT-11.

This speaks to the "great man" theory of history.  This posits that 
history would have been different if a great person had died before their 
moment in history.  Eg, Winston Churchill was hit by a car when visiting 
New York City in the 1930s.  He looked the wrong way before trying to 
cross the road.  What if he had died?  Would WW2 have turned out 
substantially differently?

The alternative is to presume that a niche exists in to which a someone 
(or in this case an operating system) will step to become great.  Using 
this alternative view, if Winston Churchill had died in the 1930s (or if 
UNIX had not been developed) an alternative would have filled that niche. 
Maybe we'd all be talking about TOPS20 now :)

Rob

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Steve Johnson]

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I have the greatest respect for Ken and Dennis, but I think their
drive for simplicity was partly the result of the exceptionally tiny
memories we all had to LIVE with.  You had to keep it simple or else
it wouldn't fit!  Every feature you added took memory that might have
been more usefully employed in another way.  So we all learned to
worship Occam just to get things done.  

I remember Dennis started out at one time to build a "real" optimizer
for C, but by the time he had built the necessary data structures he
had no room for the algorithms, or even enough data to be useful... 
And, while writing yacc, I came in one day to discover that it would
no longer compile.  Dennis had added the 'register' keyword and it
turned out that one of my yacc functions had completely filled the
symbol table.  I had to rewrite it to use one fewer variable name! 

When we got a VAX, especially when paging became available, it felt
like being released from prison.  My experience is that the problems
involved in making a program faster are often quite interesting and
fun to work on.   But the problems making things fit in a small
space are, IMHO, really deadly.

Now things are a million times bigger and it feels like chaos has
become the accepted model for how we live...  I see it particularly
with the error messages I get from programs like Python and Git. 
They seem to have two modes.  One mode gives a large amount of arcane
data (e.g., a stack trace of 20 functions, none of which are
documented) and then the error message is something like "insufficient
frabulation" which is meaningless to me) or they appear to be quite
user friendly and spell out the steps to make progress, but use words
like "fix" and "resolve" that don't translate into anything concrete
for a casual user.

There are huge advantages in having a shared frame of reference and
vocabulary, especially with co-workers.  But in our field things have
become so fragmented...   This is particularly an issue with start
ups -- people come from different environments and a lot of time is
spent simply learning how to communicate with each other...

Steve 

----- Original Message -----
From:
 "Robert Brockway" <robert at timetraveller.org>

To:
"The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
Cc:

Sent:
Mon, 5 Feb 2018 10:06:58 +1000 (AEST)
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday,
Ken Thompson!)

. . . .

 This speaks to the "great man" theory of history. This posits that 
 history would have been different if a great person had died before
their 
 moment in history. Eg, Winston Churchill was hit by a car when
visiting 
 New York City in the 1930s. He looked the wrong way before trying to 
 cross the road. What if he had died? Would WW2 have turned out 
 substantially differently?

 The alternative is to presume that a niche exists in to which a
someone 
 (or in this case an operating system) will step to become great.
Using 
 this alternative view, if Winston Churchill had died in the 1930s (or
if 
 UNIX had not been developed) an alternative would have filled that
niche. 
 Maybe we'd all be talking about TOPS20 now :)

 Rob

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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Sunday,  4 February 2018 at 21:37:53 -0800, Steve Johnson wrote:
>
> There are huge advantages in having a shared frame of reference and
> vocabulary, especially with co-workers.  But in our field things
> have become so fragmented...   This is particularly an issue with
> start ups -- people come from different environments and a lot of
> time is spent simply learning how to communicate with each other...

Amen.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
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[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Ron Natalie]

The joke was that the entire manual set for V6 UNIX and the kernel source
print out would fit into a decent size briefcase, but this was remedied in
later versions.

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Robert Brockway]

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On Sun, 4 Feb 2018, Steve Johnson wrote:

> Now things are a million times bigger and it feels like chaos has
> become the accepted model for how we live...  I see it particularly

Absolutely.  It seems like no regard is given to reducing complexity 
anymore.  I think the current path is unsustainable.  Increased complexity 
results in diminishing returns in development work eventually stifling 
innovation.

Time and time again I see people choosing overly-complicated solutions 
when, in many cases, a small shell script would suffice.

A few years ago I was left to manage (as head of the operations team) a 
monstrosity of an application that seemed to have been designed with the 
express purpose of using all available components of AWS.  I was able to 
show that there was no deterministic manner in which the application could 
be cold booted.  In the event that it needed to be restarted the 
operations team was left to bring the entire system up, watch for errors 
and cycle components in random order until the errors stopped.  I'm not 
kidding.  Fortunately that application has been sent to the bit bucket, 
never to bother anyone again.

Here's my prediction:

In a few years some people (most likely sales droids) will start talking 
about simplicity in IT and presenting it as an amazing new concept which 
no one has thought of before.  This will be very similar to the way that 
"the cloud" is sold today.

Cheers,

Rob

[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Doug McIlroy]

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> My experience is that the problems involved in making a program faster are 
> often quite interesting and fun to work on.  But the problems making things
> fit in a small space are, IMHO, really deadly.

First make things "as simple as possible, but no simpler" (Einstein). Ken and
Dennis not only cut out fat, they also found generalizations that combined
traditionally disparate features, so the new whole was smaller (and more 
comprehensible) than the sum of the old parts. The going gets tough in the 
presence of constraints on space or time. Steve's perception, I think, is 
colored by the experience of facing hard limits on space, but not on time.

Describing one complication of hard time constraints, John Kelly used to
say that the Packard Bell 250 was "the only machine I ever used where
you transfer to a time of day rather than a memory location". (The delay-
line memory had two instruction formats: one was operation + address-of-
next-instruction, the other was just the operation--the next instruction
being whatever came out of the delay line when the operation ended. The 
latter mode minimized both execution time and code space, but the attention
one had to pay to time was, to borrow Steve's phrase, "really deadly".)

Design tradeoffs for efficiency pose an almost moral conundrum:
whether to make things fast or make them easy. For example, the
classic Unix kernel typically did table lookup by linear search,
whereas Linux (when I last looked) typically used binary search. 
The price of Linux's choice is that one must take care to keep 
the tables sorted. Heavy discipline has to be imposed on making
entries and deletions.

Doug