From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.2 (2018-09-13) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.6 required=5.0 tests=DKIM_SIGNED,DKIM_VALID, DKIM_VALID_AU,FREEMAIL_FORGED_FROMDOMAIN,FREEMAIL_FROM, HEADER_FROM_DIFFERENT_DOMAINS,HTML_MESSAGE,MAILING_LIST_MULTI, RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.2 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (minnie.tuhs.org [45.79.103.53]) by inbox.vuxu.org (OpenSMTPD) with ESMTP id b39b87ea for ; Wed, 28 Aug 2019 23:10:11 +0000 (UTC) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id D0D939BFC6; Thu, 29 Aug 2019 09:10:10 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5E0979BDBB; Thu, 29 Aug 2019 09:09:40 +1000 (AEST) Authentication-Results: minnie.tuhs.org; dkim=pass (2048-bit key; unprotected) header.d=gmail.com header.i=@gmail.com header.b="rqj8EH+0"; dkim-atps=neutral Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 29AD49BDBB; Thu, 29 Aug 2019 09:09:38 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mail-ot1-f47.google.com (mail-ot1-f47.google.com [209.85.210.47]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 454E99BD79 for ; Thu, 29 Aug 2019 09:09:37 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mail-ot1-f47.google.com with SMTP id m24so1498162otp.12 for ; Wed, 28 Aug 2019 16:09:37 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=20161025; h=mime-version:references:in-reply-to:from:date:message-id:subject:to; bh=15Ax87/upM/jKQoHhWsy41V1fOhIzN8gMCUdmM/n3BM=; b=rqj8EH+0ajF1iGIEEVwryc/iOG7UgupfFusE8Jsek9ZlNOKqnDe1R9yGt2LIFktukK e814DwIPSWc7Wsjea+IxAWn8vyv4PiBuqDaWtiXkFChXJaouyE48GeMfti5X3eijwNsG +29+5aSuj/wuAGiUjmiMvuxyePbsAJzCJgxvaxh4bJpF6DDe/QDC0xqbfmWz+5ciSsb2 5qNnwabqj/fwtBnKgsKLKmLSto+xoi93oFXJCbRYILXN4arZ/cmri+vfITuOxV5+ivfZ RK6U7D4ppuy2iDafLENmk+KW0ebKORDfDlOab0cog1ifdAEmG9HiqAvvH3gSKLfZRtn3 nI5A== X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=1e100.net; s=20161025; h=x-gm-message-state:mime-version:references:in-reply-to:from:date :message-id:subject:to; bh=15Ax87/upM/jKQoHhWsy41V1fOhIzN8gMCUdmM/n3BM=; b=Fepd80LertvpnvXneJtEEO+SXnT+NCKQjmI6mB+W+Cu6BBjfM1oo3r8pTRZNoPJDOD L04PXYFUkQG522EMukxUzZdUzb6w4nSE9trXpSbE/x2zsVY5XLMG3vqznFi5EtoJbcEO XWhCSoiLFalSVAwOb4RJRSreaKjiEkxLoyXIT3CZLiVQZnguhH7GItgazpm1y0RMRYsF zfevxxASaU/ZX+VRoK4pU3WDpWiS7hm6CB3N4Ov3GFCFpNB2wIuEKEKLG7WbRxbkonwR oN918v5hdOXjaqKh2p1hcSln7IapvQSOgnKum9oIQPuCdpvM7weRGlEIB5dLScmVCQlT K7ug== X-Gm-Message-State: APjAAAUKJc4YTAItFXzdIgeFdjOgky0h873X9A2DoDREd7LsYe4t10oC 2E6PIjcE9kkZqRQtolQuWdbnm+ez8/HP4OA7uThRyQ== X-Google-Smtp-Source: APXvYqzhh4I9uCqlNjgW2hzow5apdza58RMYQDCK1xu4heC2aO4LnS9hYX5p/o0Tp2NE4DHKxHpw2VaSQ8BMZKjOQVM= X-Received: by 2002:a9d:12d1:: with SMTP id g75mr5233630otg.189.1567033776216; Wed, 28 Aug 2019 16:09:36 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <13c5c36e-c84d-e020-d09e-51c8c502dc6d@kilonet.net> <016BFF16-C490-425D-8168-3D59DCCA6A21@ccc.com> <13e8e297-0b27-ac95-8fd4-e2a9b28d0b64@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <13e8e297-0b27-ac95-8fd4-e2a9b28d0b64@gmail.com> From: Adam Thornton Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 16:09:24 -0700 Message-ID: To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="000000000000951d4c0591357b77" Subject: Re: [TUHS] If not Linux, then what? X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" --000000000000951d4c0591357b77 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" 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?" >>> >> > --000000000000951d4c0591357b77 Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
This was pre-SLS as well.=C2=A0 I remember vividly ho= w excited I was when it came out in mid-92 and how much like cheating it wa= s.=C2=A0 A little googling and I'm sure I used the HJ Lu diskettes.=C2= =A0 I don't actually remember hand-editing the MBR but, well, I probabl= y did.

Adam

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 4:01 = PM William Pechter <pechter@gmail.c= om> wrote:
On 8/28/2019 = 6:48 PM, Adam Thornton wrote:
=20
It probably was the partition/slice confusion that, well, confused me, then.=C2=A0 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.=C2=A0 Unix folks looked at partitions as=C2=A0 /dev/dsk/0s0->0s7 (I think 7 was the SVR2 maximum.=C2=A0 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.=C2=A0 You had a boot floppy and a root floppy and that was about it, I think.=C2=A0 I think the kernel had MFM/RLL disk drivers for an ISA bus interface?=C2=A0 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?=C2=A0 Probably just dding the bootsector to the first physical sector of the disk?=C2=A0 Version 0.08 or so, maybe?


Sounds like SLS -- Soft Landing System -- which later was pretty much replaced with Slackware.=C2=A0 I used the early MCA stuff on PS/2's at IBM for a while.=C2=A0 Most of the PS/2 stuff we had wa= s SCSI.=C2=A0 The boot loader was lilo.=C2=A0 It could go in the partit= ion space or disk mbr.=C2=A0 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 <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
Not true 386BSD used fdisk.=C2=A0 It shared the disk just fine.=C2=A0 In fact I liked the way it sliced the dis= k much better than Slackware in those days.=C2=A0

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect= things to be almost but not quite.=C2=A0

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.=C2= =A0 Sure, IBM's anemic marketing, and their close-to-outright-hostility to 3rd-party developers didn't help.=C2=A0 But what killed it, really, was = how damn good its 16-bit support was.=C2=A0 It *was* a bett= er DOS than DOS and a better Windows than 3.11fW.=C2=A0 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.=C2=A0 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.=C2=A0 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).=C2=A0 It was like waiting for Perl 6--it missed its moment.

Plan 9 and Amoeba were both really nifty.=C2=A0=C2= =A0=C2=A0 I never used Sprite.=C2=A0 Neither one of them had much o= f a chance in the real world.=C2=A0 Much like Unix itself= , Linux's worse-is-better approach really worked.=C2= =A0

I have a hypothesis about Linux's ascendance too= , which is a personal anecdote I am inflating to the status of hypothesis.=C2=A0 As I recall, the *BSDs for 386 all assumed they owned the hard disk.=C2=A0 Like, t= he whole thing.=C2=A0 You couldn't, at least in 1992, = create a multiboot system--or at least it was my strong impression you could not.=C2=A0 I was an undergrad.=C2= =A0 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).=C2=A0 Papers, and, well, = to play games.=C2=A0 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.=C2=A0 I&= #39;m probably not the only person for whom this was a decisive factor.

Adam

On Wed, Aug 28, 201= 9 at 1:08 PM Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, 26 Aug 2019 at 19:14, Arthur Krewat <krewat@kilonet.net> wrote:
<= a href=3D"https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/26/0051234/celebrating-the= -28th-anniversary-of-the-linux-kernel" rel=3D"noreferrer" target=3D"_blank"= >https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/26/0051234/celebrating-the-28th-ann= iversary-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 :-)<= /div>

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 t= hat 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.=C2=A0 (Nay, one should put that mo= re strongly...=C2=A0 That had their minds set on something NOT from Microsoft.)=C2=A0 So I think w= e can cross Windows NT off the list.

- OS/2 should briefly come on the list.=C2=A0 = It was likable in many ways, if only IBM had actually supported it...=C2=A0 But it suffers fro= m 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 =C2=A0years from now that wi= ll be different, =C2=A0but 5 years from
now =C2=A0everyone =C2=A0will =C2=A0be =C2=A0runn= ing =C2=A0free =C2=A0GNU on =C2=A0their =C2=A0200 =C2=A0MIPS, =C2=A064M
SPARCstation-5." =C2=A0-- Andrew Tanenbaum, = 1992.
%
"You'll be =C2=A0rid of most of us =C2= =A0when BSD-detox or GNU =C2=A0comes 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 =C2=A0of a micro k= ernel approach.=C2=A0 However, the
fact remains =C2=A0that Linux is =C2=A0here, and GN= U =C2=A0isn't --- and =C2=A0people 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.=C2=A0 In order for Hurd to "mak= e it," Mach has to "make it," too, and it looked= like they were depending on CMU to be behind that.=C2=A0 (I'm not sure I'm right about that; happy t= o hear a better story.)

Anyway, Hurd *might* have been a "next thing," and I don't think the popularity o= f 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&q= uot; 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.=C2=A0 Many of us had admired it from afar via the Dr Dobbs Journal issue (when was that?=C2=A0 mid or late '90s?) but only fro= m afar.

- FreeBSD is the single best answer I can throw up as a possibility, as it was the one actively targeting 80386 hardware.=C2=A0 And that h= ad 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.=C2=A0 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?"


--000000000000951d4c0591357b77--