From: Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] If not Linux, then what?
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 15:48:43 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAP2nic0GxgqRvz5z9vfRWXjo5-UpbNsut8S0F4vduYLw+a6-Sw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <016BFF16-C490-425D-8168-3D59DCCA6A21@ccc.com>
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It probably was the partition/slice confusion that, well, confused me,
then. My experience, such as it was, was from the DOS world.
Although the period I am thinking of was way pre-slackware. You had a boot
floppy and a root floppy and that was about it, I think. I think the
kernel had MFM/RLL disk drivers for an ISA bus interface? I remember that
I could boot the thing on the MCA machines in the lab but not actually
install it (even had I been allowed to), and I think installation was
pretty much fdisk/mkfs, extract the tarball...I don't remember how you
installed the bootloader...which I guess was already LILO at that point?
Probably just dding the bootsector to the first physical sector of the
disk? Version 0.08 or so, maybe?
It was quite a while ago, and I was drunk for most of college, so....memory
is imprecise at best.
On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 3:28 PM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> Not true 386BSD used fdisk. It shared the disk just fine. In fact I
> liked the way it sliced the disk much better than Slackware in those days.
>
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
> quite.
>
> On Aug 28, 2019, at 4:27 PM, Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I was an ardent OS/2 supporter for a long time. Sure, IBM's anemic
> marketing, and their close-to-outright-hostility to 3rd-party developers
> didn't help. But what killed it, really, was how damn good its 16-bit
> support was. It *was* a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than
> 3.11fW. So no one wrote to the relatively tiny market of 32-bit OS/2.
>
> I fear that had Linux not made the leap, MS might well have won. It's
> largely the AOL-fuelled explosion of popularity of the Internet and Windows
> ignoring same until too late that opened the door enough for Linux to jam
> its foot in.
>
> Hurd was, by the time of the '386 Unix Wars and early Linux, clearly not
> going to be a contender, I guess because it was about cool research
> features rather than running user-facing code. I kept waiting for a usable
> kernel to go with what Linux had already shown was a quite decent
> userspace, but eventually had better things to do with my life (like chase
> BeOS). It was like waiting for Perl 6--it missed its moment.
>
> Plan 9 and Amoeba were both really nifty. I never used Sprite. Neither
> one of them had much of a chance in the real world. Much like Unix itself,
> Linux's worse-is-better approach really worked.
>
> I have a hypothesis about Linux's ascendance too, which is a personal
> anecdote I am inflating to the status of hypothesis. As I recall, the
> *BSDs for 386 all assumed they owned the hard disk. Like, the whole
> thing. You couldn't, at least in 1992, create a multiboot system--or at
> least it was my strong impression you could not. I was an undergrad. I
> had one '386 at my disposal, with one hard disk, and, hey, I needed DOS and
> Windows to write my papers (I don't know about you, but I wanted to write
> in my room, where I could have my references at hand and be reasonably
> undisturbed; sure Framemaker was a much better setup than Word For Windows
> 1.2 but having to use it in the computer lab made it a nonstarter for me).
> Papers, and, well, to play games. Sure, that too.
>
> Linux let me defragment my drive, non-destructively repartition it, and
> create a dual-boot system, so that I could both use the computer for school
> and screw around on Linux. I'm probably not the only person for whom this
> was a decisive factor.
>
> Adam
>
> On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 1:08 PM Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 26 Aug 2019 at 19:14, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/26/0051234/celebrating-the-28th-anniversary-of-the-linux-kernel
>>>
>>> Leaving licensing and copyright issues out of this mental exercise, what
>>> would we have now if it wasn't for Linux? Not what you'd WANT it to be,
>>> although that can add to the discussion, but what WOULD it be?
>>>
>>> I'm not asking as a proponent of Linux. If anything, I was dragged
>>> kicking and screaming into the current day and have begrudgingly ceded
>>> my server space to Linux.
>>>
>>> But if not for Linux, would it be BSD? A System V variant? Or (the
>>> horror) Windows NT?
>>>
>>
>> I can make a firm "dunno" sound :-)
>>
>> Some facts can come together to point away from a number of
>> possibilities...
>>
>> - If you look at the number of hobbyist "Unix homages" that emerged at
>> around that time, it's clear that there was a sizable community of
>> interested folk willing to build their own thing, and that weren't
>> interested in Windows NT. (Nay, one should put that more strongly... That
>> had their minds set on something NOT from Microsoft.) So I think we can
>> cross Windows NT off the list.
>>
>> - OS/2 should briefly come on the list. It was likable in many ways, if
>> only IBM had actually supported it... But it suffers from something of the
>> same problem as Windows NT; there were a lot of folk that were only
>> slightly less despising of IBM at the time than of Microsoft.
>>
>> - Hurd was imagined to be the next thing...
>>
>> To borrow from my cookie file...
>>
>> "Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from
>> now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M
>> SPARCstation-5." -- Andrew Tanenbaum, 1992.
>> %
>> "You'll be rid of most of us when BSD-detox or GNU comes out, which
>> should happen in the next few months (yeah, right)." -- Richard Tobin,
>> 1992. [BSD did follow within a year]
>> %
>> "I am aware of the benefits of a micro kernel approach. However, the
>> fact remains that Linux is here, and GNU isn't --- and people have
>> been working on Hurd for a lot longer than Linus has been working on
>> Linux." -- Ted T'so, 1992.
>>
>> Ted has been on this thread, and should be amused (and slightly
>> disturbed!) that his old statements are being held here and there, ready to
>> trot out :-).
>>
>> In the absence of Linux, perhaps hackers would have flocked to Hurd, but
>> there was enough going on that there was plenty of room for them to have
>> done so anyways.
>>
>> I'm not sure what to blame on whatever happened post-1992, though I'd put
>> some on Microsoft Research having taken the wind out of Mach's sails by
>> hiring off a bunch of the relevant folk. In order for Hurd to "make it,"
>> Mach has to "make it," too, and it looked like they were depending on CMU
>> to be behind that. (I'm not sure I'm right about that; happy to hear a
>> better story.)
>>
>> Anyway, Hurd *might* have been a "next thing," and I don't think the
>> popularity of Linux was enough to have completely taken wind out of its
>> sails, given that there's the dozens of "Unix homages" out there.
>>
>> - I'd like to imagine Plan 9 being an alternative, but it was "properly
>> commercial" for a goodly long time (hence not amenable to attaching waves
>> of hackers to it to add their favorite device drivers), and was never taken
>> as a serious answer. Many of us had admired it from afar via the Dr Dobbs
>> Journal issue (when was that? mid or late '90s?) but only from afar.
>>
>> - FreeBSD is the single best answer I can throw up as a possibility, as
>> it was the one actively targeting 80386 hardware. And that had the big
>> risk of the AT&T lawsuit lurking over it, so had that gone in a different
>> direction, then that is a branch sadly easily trimmed.
>>
>> If we lop both Linux and FreeBSD off the list of possibilities, I don't
>> imagine Windows NT or OS/2 bubble to the top, instead, a critical mass
>> would have stood behind ... something else, I'd think. I don't know which
>> to suggest.
>> --
>> When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
>> question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
>>
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-08-28 22:49 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 96+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-08-26 23:13 Arthur Krewat
2019-08-26 23:27 ` Warner Losh
2019-08-26 23:37 ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-26 23:56 ` William Pechter
2019-08-27 0:19 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-27 0:30 ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27 0:58 ` Rob Pike
2019-08-27 1:06 ` Clem Cole
2019-08-27 2:53 ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27 9:47 ` Rob Pike
2019-08-27 7:47 ` arnold
2019-08-27 16:05 ` [TUHS] Running v10 Angelo Papenhoff
2019-08-27 16:27 ` Henry Bent
2019-08-28 4:22 ` Jason Stevens
2019-08-28 7:34 ` Angelo Papenhoff
2019-08-28 16:46 ` Henry Bent
2019-08-27 0:59 ` [TUHS] If not Linux, then what? Arthur Krewat
2019-08-27 1:26 ` Dan Cross
2019-08-27 2:45 ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27 3:14 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-27 14:55 ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27 22:30 ` George Michaelson
2019-08-27 22:40 ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27 22:46 ` George Michaelson
2019-08-27 22:59 ` [TUHS] [SPAM] " Larry McVoy
2019-08-27 23:10 ` [TUHS] " Clem Cole
2019-08-28 0:07 ` George Michaelson
2019-08-28 3:22 ` [TUHS] [SPAM] " Rob Pike
2019-08-28 3:25 ` Rob Pike
2019-08-28 4:05 ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-28 13:52 ` Clem Cole
2019-08-28 14:31 ` [TUHS] " Larry McVoy
2019-08-28 14:57 ` Clem Cole
2019-08-28 6:19 ` Wesley Parish
2019-08-28 6:30 ` Peter Jeremy
2019-08-28 11:05 ` Jason Stevens
2019-08-28 11:11 ` Arrigo Triulzi
2019-08-28 14:04 ` Clem Cole
2019-08-28 16:34 ` Henry Bent
2019-08-28 17:32 ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-28 17:51 ` Jon Forrest
2019-08-28 18:56 ` Clem Cole
2019-08-28 20:23 ` Arrigo Triulzi
2019-08-29 3:24 ` Lawrence Stewart
2019-08-29 10:55 ` Tony Finch
2019-08-28 13:57 ` Clem Cole
2019-08-28 12:46 ` Warner Losh
2019-08-27 23:16 ` Bakul Shah
2019-08-27 23:33 ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-28 0:21 ` Bakul Shah
2019-08-28 1:21 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-28 1:46 ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27 0:48 ` Clem Cole
2019-08-27 1:25 ` Gregg Levine
2019-08-27 2:16 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-08-27 2:39 ` Larry McVoy
2019-08-27 5:54 ` Adam Thornton
2019-08-27 6:05 ` Gregg Levine
2019-08-27 1:17 ` Dan Cross
2019-08-28 3:53 ` Charles H. Sauer
2019-08-28 4:30 ` Jason Stevens
2019-08-28 9:36 ` Angus Robinson
2019-08-28 9:50 ` Michael Kjörling
2019-08-28 10:48 ` arnold
2019-08-28 14:10 ` Earl Baugh
2019-08-28 14:55 ` Clem Cole
2019-08-28 14:22 ` Charles H Sauer
2019-08-28 15:00 ` Steve Nickolas
2019-08-28 15:37 ` Richard Salz
2019-08-28 19:54 ` Peter Jeremy
2019-08-28 20:05 ` Christopher Browne
2019-08-28 20:07 ` Christopher Browne
2019-08-28 20:27 ` Adam Thornton
2019-08-28 20:56 ` William Pechter
2019-08-28 22:24 ` Clem cole
2019-08-28 22:27 ` William Pechter
2019-08-28 22:53 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-29 18:40 ` Nemo Nusquam
2019-08-29 19:18 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2019-08-28 22:28 ` Clem cole
2019-08-28 22:48 ` Adam Thornton [this message]
2019-08-28 23:01 ` William Pechter
2019-08-28 23:09 ` Adam Thornton
2019-08-29 6:37 ` Wesley Parish
2019-08-28 23:04 ` Gregg Levine
2019-08-29 11:12 ` Tony Finch
2019-08-28 23:19 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-08-29 13:31 ` A. P. Garcia
2019-08-29 13:55 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-29 15:54 ` Thomas Paulsen
2019-08-29 19:19 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2019-08-31 1:35 ` Dave Horsfall
2019-08-31 15:14 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2019-08-31 16:58 ` Christopher Browne
2019-08-31 21:20 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2019-08-28 21:02 ` Thomas Paulsen
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