Yes, thanks Heinz, Jim Isaac is the name I was trying to remember. The standards effort I was involved in was part of the now-forgotten (I hope) GUI Wars, in which a bunch of workstation makers (I remember DEC, HP, and IBM, among others) supporting an X Window System GUI toolkit called Motif battled Sun and AT&T who pushed OpenLook. OpenLook was about 50 times more elegant, but Motif won the day. It came from OSF, the Open Systems Foundation, which was easily the most arrogant organization I ever dealt with. I think they were disbanded as a result of a lawsuit involving restraint of trade, or monopolistic behavior, or a cartel, or something along those lines. (You could view the GUI Wars as East Coast vs. West Coast and you might be right, except that AT&T joined the West Coast side.) My role in all of this is that there was an IEEE effort to standardize a GUI API based not on Motif or OpenLook, but on a cross-platform system that I invented called XVT. The user manual, which I wrote, was the base document. I think the Motif folks managed at one point to get their own standards committee. I know that our effort fizzled. I don't know if there ever was a Motif standard. Motif, like X, was easily used by anyone who was an MIT CS grad student. OpenLook might have been used by Sun Workstation programmers, but I don't know if it ever appeared on any other system. My own system, XVT, wasn't so great either and was very limited. But as a guy I worked with once at Bell Labs on Cobol stuff said once about Cobol, "Hey, it put my kids through college." XVT put my kids through college. (Yes, Bell Labs was programming systems in Cobol. Those were the folks we built the Programmer's Workbench for!) While the GUI Wars were going on, Apple conquered the hearts and minds of the intelligentsia, and Microsoft conquered the corporations and government. (Progress in chips made workstations disappear as a distinct species.) Neither Apple nor Microsoft gave a fig about Motif, OpenLook, X, or any of that academic stuff. Marc On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 1:35 PM Heinz Lycklama wrote: > The POSIX Standard for the UNIX System was actually > started under the umbrella of /usr/group, which was > comprised mostly of commercial companies and users > of the UNIX system. /usr/group was the forerunner > of UniForum. I chaired the /usr/group standard from > 1981 to 1984, after which we turned the work over > to the IEEE, chaired by Jim Isaac and co-chaired by > myself. I worked for INTERACTIVE Systems Corp, > in Santa Monica, CA- the first commercial UNIX > company that provided for UNIX system software > on the DEC PDP11 and VAX computers, and led the > porting of the UNIX System to many different computer > architectures from micro to mainframe. > > Heinz > > On 6/26/2024 11:52 AM, segaloco via TUHS wrote: > > On Wednesday, June 26th, 2024 at 11:43 AM, James Johnston < > audioskeptic@gmail.com> wrote: > > > >> ANSI accredits US standards committees and delegates, both to US and > International Meetings. > >> ANSI can vote to accept a standard. While I don't know the issue behind > POSIX, it's entirely possible that ANSI accredited IEEE to standardize > things. They have done this to many various groups for standards within > their wheelhouse. Sometimes this has worked well, sometimes it has worked > to the interest of some particular entity, speaking as someone who has > spent one to many days hanging out in standards meetings as a "technical > expert". > >> > >> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 11:35 AM Marc Rochkind > wrote: > >> > >>> I think historically ANSI did languages. > >>> But, I don't know specifically why IEEE became the standards body for > POSIX. I did participate for a while in the IEEE standards process (not > POSIX, but something else), and I knew it as a large, very active, well > managed organization, always eager to take on new things (such as the thing > that I was engaged in). So maybe that was one reason. > >>> > >>> Maybe a greater reason is that the part of IEEE standards that did > software was chaired by a person from DEC (forgot his name). I'm sure DEC > had a strong interest in a UNIX-based standard, if only to make sure that > it didn't go completely wild and negate DEC's huge head start in selling > machines to run UNIX. > >>> > >>> Marc > >>> > >>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 12:22 PM segaloco via TUHS > wrote: > >>> > >>>> Good morning, I was wondering if anyone has the scoop on the > rationale behind the selection of standards bodies for the publication of > UNIX and UNIX-adjacent standards. C was published via the ANSI route as > X3.159, whereas POSIX was instead published by the IEEE route as 1003.1. > Was there every any consideration of C through IEEE or POSIX through ANSI > instead? Is there an appreciable difference suggested by the difference in > publishers? In any case, both saw subsequent adoption by ISO/IEC, so the > track to an international standard seems to lead to the same organizations. > >>>> > >>>> - Matt G. > >>> > >>> > >>> -- > >>> My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com > >> > >> > >> -- > >> James D. (jj) Johnston > >> > >> Chief Scientist, Immersion Networks > > Well and that touches on one of the standards that adds some interest to > this discussion: "An American National Standard IEEE Standard Pascal > Computer Programming Language". In this case, ANSI/IEEE 770 X3.97 is the > Pascal standard as sponsored by both IEEE *and* ANSI. The lines can > certainly blur. Another example of a language standard under IEEE is 1076, > VHDL. Could it be interpreted as such: > > > > IEEE is one institute among many that may originate the creation and > publication of standards in the field of electrical engineering and > adjacent fields. ANSI, in turn, is a national general standards body that > publishes standards created by groups such as IEEE as well as those created > relatively independently by their own committees such as X3. > > > > In other words you're liable to have IEEE standards that get tracked as > ANSI, but the likelihood of ANSI cooking something up in their own > committees and then bouncing it out to IEEE is lower if present at all? > > > > - Matt G. > > > > P.S. If anyone wants a trial-use copy of POSIX, there's one sitting on > eBay right now https://www.ebay.com/itm/145798619385 > > -- *My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com *