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

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

[Ron Natalie]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/html, Size: 5298 bytes --]

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

[Tom Lyon]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1751 bytes --]

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

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

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

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2515 bytes --]

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

[Clem Cole]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1737 bytes --]

below.

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

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

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

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3055 bytes --]