This was pre-SLS as well. I remember vividly how excited I was when it came out in mid-92 and how much like cheating it was. A little googling and I'm sure I used the HJ Lu diskettes. I don't actually remember hand-editing the MBR but, well, I probably did. Adam On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 4:01 PM William Pechter wrote: > On 8/28/2019 6:48 PM, Adam Thornton wrote: > > It probably was the partition/slice confusion that, well, confused me, > then. My experience, such as it was, was from the DOS world. > > As was mine mostly 8-) I remember it from the PITA it was to translate in > my head. Unix folks looked at partitions as /dev/dsk/0s0->0s7 (I think 7 > was the SVR2 maximum. The "Unix" partitions fit inside the FDISK partition > or dos slice... The dos guys looked at it kind of like the fdisk space > disk0 partition 3 (for example) was the partition and then the BSD folks > broke that in to /dev/sd0a /dev/sd0b /dev/sd0c etc. > > I did a little SunOS and SysV along with Dos and Windows and could make > them coexist as long as there was an open primary dos partition. > > > > 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? > > > Sounds like SLS -- Soft Landing System -- which later was pretty much > replaced with Slackware. I used the early MCA stuff on PS/2's at IBM for a > while. Most of the PS/2 stuff we had was SCSI. The boot loader was lilo. > It could go in the partition space or disk mbr. See: > https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-bootload/index.html > > > 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 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 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 >> wrote: >> >>> On Mon, 26 Aug 2019 at 19:14, Arthur Krewat 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?" >>> >> >