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From: Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>
To: Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] A/UX [was Linux is on-topic]
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2020 12:18:03 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAP2nic2Yd5ggdJfjDVGn-49_9ePmX8EEiQ2dp8zFAiPuMSKvKg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAEoi9W7sALfoAfeEjFu=7vXEksAUs1w2O88HG6hdoM5mudNOqA@mail.gmail.com>

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Early AIX is what happens when you give a detailed description of Unix to
mainframers who've never seen Unix, and then tell them to implement that
system, and then ship it, without at any point letting someone who's used
an actual Unix system touch it.

Adam

On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 10:16 AM Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 9:37 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 07:12:57PM -0400, Richard Salz wrote:
>> > > SMIT was quite nice
>> >
>> > i have never seen those four words together like that before.
>>
>> Me neither.  SMIT was HORRIBLE if you understood the files in /etc and
>> knew what to do with them.
>
>
> The sysadmin in the CS department had a USENIX button on his wall: "SMIT
> happens." I always found that amusing.
>
> The Motif-version was especially horrible, and crashed all the time. The
> curses-based version was called `smitty`, which I found humorous in a way I
> wouldn't have expected coming from "This page intentionally left blank"
> IBM. In my mind, the worst part of admining RS/6000 boxes of that era was
> the little 3-digit LED code on the front: I guess those machines didn't
> assume that they had either a graphical head or a serial port, so this damn
> teeny tiny display would cycle through a sequence of codes that told you
> what the machine was doing; it came with a book that told you what each
> code meant. Something like "387" meant mounting /usr. Ugh; I just found a
> page on ibm.com describing these "IPL codes."
>
> It might be nice if you had no understanding
>> of how to admin a Unix system and here is this "nice" curses based way
>> to do admin.
>>
>
> The thing was that IBM changed a lot of stuff almost gratuitously.
> Specifics I remember were the print daemon (I ported `lpd` from 4.4BSD for
> that) and anything related to disks and filesystems. In fairness, they had
> logical volumes that could split across disks before most other Unix
> systems that I was working on at the time, but the commands were all custom
> to AIX and, frankly, weird: I remember that one would "vary on" a logical
> volume before one could mount a filesystem from it or something like that.
> I was told at the time that the people who'd built that side of things had
> come from the mainframe world, where that was the nomenclature. Creating
> JFS filesystems required these tools as well; there was new `newfs_jfs` as
> I recall. So I ended up using SMIT for basically anything related to
> filesystems, but for almost nothing else.
>
> To anyone remotely competent, and I don't mean edit sendmail.cf, I mean
>> you can edit inetd.conf, you can edit a crontab file, etc, SMIT was a
>> nightmare that made something that should be vi $FILE, done 20 seconds
>> later, a hellish journey through their menus.  It was AWFUL.
>>
>
> One of the more gratuitous differences I remember from AIX was that
> instead of having e.g. /etc/shadow, they had /etc/password (all spelled
> out), which had semi-structured stanzas for each user. That was just weird.
> Fortunately, we were using NIS and it was smart enough to ignore that for
> NIS users.
>
> Ask me how I know.
>>
>
> I still have nightmares about AIX.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
>

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2020-08-13 19:19 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 106+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-07-17 18:08 [TUHS] H.J. Lu Bootable Root & Base System disks Norman Wilson
2020-07-17 18:14 ` John Cowan
2020-07-17 18:19 ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-17 19:53 ` [TUHS] Linux is on-topic Warren Toomey
2020-07-17 19:57   ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-17 20:00     ` Adam Thornton
2020-07-17 20:04       ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-17 20:03     ` Dan Cross
2020-07-17 23:31       ` A. P. Garcia
2020-07-19 10:26       ` emanuel stiebler
2020-07-17 20:07     ` Warren Toomey
2020-07-17 20:12       ` Warner Losh
2020-07-17 20:19       ` Clem Cole
2020-07-19  9:54       ` Sergio Pedraja
2020-07-17 20:08     ` Michael Kjörling
2020-07-17 20:55       ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2020-07-17 21:28         ` Michael Kjörling
2020-07-18 20:22           ` Ed Carp
2020-07-18 20:29             ` Warner Losh
2020-07-19  2:31               ` Gregg Levine
2020-07-19  3:46               ` Wesley Parish
2020-07-19  4:42                 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2020-07-19 18:01                   ` Michael Parson
2020-07-20  8:47                     ` [TUHS] A/UX [was Linux is on-topic] arnold
2020-07-20  9:46                       ` Arno Griffioen
2020-07-20 16:35                         ` Arthur Krewat
2020-07-20 17:44                           ` Arno Griffioen
2020-07-20 19:07                         ` Rich Morin
2020-07-20 19:45                           ` Al Kossow
2020-07-20 19:49                             ` Al Kossow
2020-07-24  0:01                               ` Chris Hanson
2020-07-20 20:20                         ` Ed Carp
2020-07-20 21:02                           ` John Cowan
2020-07-20 22:27                             ` Ed Carp
2020-07-24  0:04                             ` Chris Hanson
2020-07-31 23:02                             ` Dave Horsfall
2020-07-31 23:12                               ` Richard Salz
2020-08-01  1:36                                 ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-01 16:08                                   ` Nemo Nusquam
2020-08-01 17:01                                     ` Arthur Krewat
2020-08-13  0:00                                   ` Dave Horsfall
2020-08-13  1:47                                     ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-13  3:15                                       ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2020-08-13  4:02                                         ` Larry Cashdollar via TUHS
2020-08-31 21:12                                         ` Dave Horsfall
2020-09-03 14:10                                           ` Michael Parson
2020-08-13  1:53                                     ` Nemo Nusquam
2020-08-13 17:14                                   ` Dan Cross
2020-08-13 17:19                                     ` Henry Bent
2020-08-13 17:58                                       ` Warner Losh
2020-08-13 20:04                                       ` John Cowan
2020-08-13 20:52                                         ` Dan Cross
2020-08-14 17:31                                         ` Paul Winalski
2020-08-15  1:24                                           ` Dave Horsfall
2020-08-18 13:57                                         ` Derek Fawcus
2020-08-18 14:11                                           ` John Cowan
2020-08-31 21:20                                         ` Dave Horsfall
2020-08-13 19:18                                     ` Adam Thornton [this message]
2020-08-13 19:28                                       ` Warner Losh
2020-08-13 20:15                                         ` [TUHS] AIX link repost [was " Charles H Sauer
2020-08-13 20:09                                       ` [TUHS] " Rich
2020-08-13 20:16                                         ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-13 20:17                                         ` Dr Iain Maoileoin
2020-08-14  1:04                                         ` Christopher Browne
2020-08-14 17:18                                           ` Jim Capp
2020-08-14 17:37                                             ` Jim Capp
2020-08-14 17:39                                             ` Jon Steinhart
2020-08-15  0:33                                               ` Rich
2020-08-15  1:20                                                 ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-15  2:08                                                   ` Dave Horsfall
2020-08-15  2:47                                                     ` Warner Losh
2020-08-15 17:44                                                     ` Paul Winalski
2020-08-15 12:05                                                   ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-08-15  1:33                                                 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-08-15  2:02                                                 ` Dave Horsfall
2020-08-15  2:45                                                   ` Andrew Hume
2020-08-15 16:55                                                     ` William Cheswick
2020-08-15  3:29                                                   ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-15  1:40                                             ` Gregg Levine
2020-08-13 22:24                                     ` Grant Taylor via TUHS
2020-07-24  0:02                           ` Chris Hanson
2020-07-20  9:48                       ` Andrew Warkentin
2020-07-20 11:49                         ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-20 14:36                           ` Clem Cole
2020-07-20 17:24                           ` John Cowan
2020-07-20 22:11                           ` Ed Carp
2020-07-21  1:04                             ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-22  3:13                               ` tytso
2020-07-22  5:40                                 ` Bakul Shah
2020-07-22 14:16                                   ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-20 12:32                       ` Derrik Walker v2.0
2020-07-20 12:54                         ` Andrew Warkentin
2020-07-21  1:50                           ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-21  2:30                             ` Gregg Levine
2020-07-22  3:44                         ` Jason
2020-07-22 12:23                           ` Derrik Walker v2.0
2020-07-20 14:28                       ` Clem Cole
2020-07-22  3:50                         ` Jason
2020-07-22  4:26                           ` Henry Bent
2020-07-24  0:10                             ` Chris Hanson
2020-07-20  0:24               ` [TUHS] Linux is on-topic Ed Carp
2020-07-22  3:41             ` Jason
2020-07-22 16:15               ` Michael Parson
2020-07-18  3:34     ` Tomasz Rola
2020-07-18 16:45     ` Christopher Browne
2020-07-19  7:32       ` Lars Brinkhoff

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