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* Re: [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before
@ 2019-02-03 20:58 Clem Cole
  2019-02-03 21:08 ` Cág
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2019-02-03 20:58 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Cág; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 2:59 PM Cág <ca6c@bitmessage.ch> wrote:

> [Hockey Pucks and AIX are alive, Wikipedia says.
> The problem could be that neither support amd64 and/or

 Be careful.  The history of proprietary commercial UNIX implementations is
that they were developed by HW manufacturers that had proprietary ISAs.  So
that fact that UX was Itanium and AIX was Power (or Tru64 in its day was
Alpha) should not be surprising.  It was the way the market developed. Each
vendor sold a unique ecosystem and tried very hard to keep you in it.
Portability was designed as an >>import<< idea, and they tried to keep you
from exporting by getting you to use 'value add.'

I remember during the reign of terror that Solaris created.  Take as an
example, the standard portable threading library was pThreads.   But
Solaris threads were faster and Sun did everything it could get the ISV's
write using Solaris Threads.  Guess what -- they did.  So at DEC we found
ourselves implementing a Solaris Threads package for Tru64, so the ISVs
could run their code (I don't know if IBM or HP did it too, because at the
time, our competition was Sun).

BTW:  this attitude was nothing new.  I've said it before, the greatest
piece of marketing DEC ever did was convince the world that VMS Fortran was
Fortran-77.  It was not close.   And when you walked into most people
writing real production code (in Fortran of course), you discovered they
had used all of the VMS Fortran extensions.   When the UNIX folks arrived
on the scene the f77 in Seventh Edition was not good enough.  You saw first
Masscomp in '85, then a year later Apollo and 2 years after that, Sun
develop really, really good Fortran's -- all that were VMS Fortran
compatible.

nobody cares about commercial Unix systems anymore.
>
This is a bit of blind and sweeping statement which again, I would take
some care.
There are very large commercial sites that continue to run proprietary UNIX
on those same proprietary ISAs, often with ISV and in-home developed
applications that are quite valuable.  For instance, a lot of the financial
and insurance industries live here.   The question comes to how to value
and count it.   Just because the hackers don't work there, does not mean
there are not a lots firms doing it.

Those sites are extremely large and represent a lot of money.  The number
of them is unlikely to be growing last time I looked at the numbers.  In
fact, in some cases, they >>are<< being displaced by Intel*64 systems
running a flavor of Linux.   The key driver for this was the moving the
commercial applications such as Oracle and SAP to Linux and in particular,
Linux running on VMs.  But a huge issue was code reuse.   To reuse, Henry's
great line about BSD, Linux is just like Unix; only different.

Simply has the cost of maintaining your own ISA and complete SW ecosystem
for it continues to rise and in fact is getting more and more expensive as
the market shrinks.  At this point, the only ones left are HP, IBM and the
shadow of Sunoracle.  They are servicing a market that is fixed.


>
> As far as commercial systems go, even CentOS has a far larger market
> share on the supercomputer territory than RHEL does, according to
> TOP500.
>
Again be careful.  In fact this my world that I have lived for about 40+
years.   The Top100 system folks really do not want any stinking OS between
their application and the hardware.  They never have.  Don't kid yourself.
This is why systems like mOS (Rolf Riesen's MultiOS slides
<https://wrome.github.io/slides/rome16_riesen.pdf>  and github sources
<https://github.com/intel/mOS/wiki>) are being developed.

Simply put, the HPC folks have always wanted the OS out the way.   Unix was
a convenience for them and Linux just replaced UNIX.   The RHEL licensing
scheme is per CPU and on a Beowulf style cluster, it does not make a lot of
sense.

I know a lot of the Linux community likes to crow about the supers using
Linux.  They really don't  Its what runs on the login node and the job
scheduler.   It could be anything as long as its cheap, fast and the
physicists can hack on it.   This is a behavior that goes back the
Manhatten Project and its unchanged.  The 'capability' systems are a
high-end world that is tuned for a very specific job.   You can learn a lot
in that area, but because about making generalizations.

As I like to say -- Fortran still pays my salary.   These folks codes are
unchanged since my father's time as a 'computer' at Rocket Dyne in the
1950s.   What has changed is the size of the datasets.  But open up those
codes and you'll discover the same math.  They tend to be equation
solvers.  We just have a lot more variables.

Clem

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before
  2019-02-03 20:58 [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before Clem Cole
@ 2019-02-03 21:08 ` Cág
  2019-02-03 22:20   ` Clem Cole
  2019-02-03 21:17 ` Larry McVoy
  2019-02-03 22:14 ` Henry Bent
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread
From: Cág @ 2019-02-03 21:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

Thanks for your insight, Mr. Cole.  My statements were merely a 
deduction
and speculation.

> As I like to say -- Fortran still pays my salary.

I wish I could say that.  I feel like nobody needs Fortran anymore, and
my skills are being wasted.

--
caóc


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before
  2019-02-03 20:58 [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before Clem Cole
  2019-02-03 21:08 ` Cág
@ 2019-02-03 21:17 ` Larry McVoy
  2019-02-03 22:14 ` Henry Bent
  2 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Larry McVoy @ 2019-02-03 21:17 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On Sun, Feb 03, 2019 at 03:58:39PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 2:59 PM C??g <ca6c@bitmessage.ch> wrote:
> 
> > [Hockey Pucks and AIX are alive, Wikipedia says.
> > The problem could be that neither support amd64 and/or
> 
>  Be careful.  The history of proprietary commercial UNIX implementations is
> that they were developed by HW manufacturers that had proprietary ISAs.  So
> that fact that UX was Itanium and AIX was Power (or Tru64 in its day was
> Alpha) should not be surprising.  It was the way the market developed. Each
> vendor sold a unique ecosystem and tried very hard to keep you in it.
> Portability was designed as an >>import<< idea, and they tried to keep you
> from exporting by getting you to use 'value add.'

Not on Sun's.  I personally wrote lint libraries for other OS's, BSD,
strict POSIX, System V, etc.  Had a huge fight with Gingell to get
them included in SunOS 4.something (he didn't want to give up 40KB
of extra files in the install; I threatened to quit if they didn't
go in - I won).

My theory was Sun was the most liked development platform, I wanted
to keep that going.  The idea was make it so you could develop for 
any major target on Suns.  Yeah, I wanted the devs to be on Suns but
be able to deploy on whatever you had to. 

> Linux running on VMs.  But a huge issue was code reuse.   To reuse, Henry's
> great line about BSD, Linux is just like Unix; only different.

That's because people are sloppy and don't code to a standard.  If you
look through the BitKeeper code you'll find our own libc that is portable
across pretty much every major commercial Unix, Linux (at one point on
Alpha, PPC, MIPS, SPARC, x86, x86-64, even whatever the IBM mainframe
Unix), BSD, MacOS and Windows.

The hardest part was fork(2), we didn't figure out a way to emulate that
so we redid windows spawn() style on Unix.  I have typed out 

	switch (pid = fork()) {
		...
	}

in decades.

Yeah, we have a few #ifdefs but the libc interface our code uses is 
quite clean and portable.

So it is possible to have code that runs everywhere but you have to
get disciplined about it.

Other than those quibbles, I agree with Clem.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before
  2019-02-03 20:58 [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before Clem Cole
  2019-02-03 21:08 ` Cág
  2019-02-03 21:17 ` Larry McVoy
@ 2019-02-03 22:14 ` Henry Bent
  2019-02-03 22:23   ` Clem Cole
  2 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread
From: Henry Bent @ 2019-02-03 22:14 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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On Sun, 3 Feb 2019 at 16:00, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> BTW:  this attitude was nothing new.  I've said it before, the greatest
> piece of marketing DEC ever did was convince the world that VMS Fortran was
> Fortran-77.  It was not close.   And when you walked into most people
> writing real production code (in Fortran of course), you discovered they
> had used all of the VMS Fortran extensions.   When the UNIX folks arrived
> on the scene the f77 in Seventh Edition was not good enough.  You saw first
> Masscomp in '85, then a year later Apollo and 2 years after that, Sun
> develop really, really good Fortran's -- all that were VMS Fortran
> compatible.
>

This code was apparently so pervasive and long-lived that the GNU Fortran
compiler added compatibility for DEC extensions less than two years ago, in
version 7.  There must be enough demand for DEC's additions to have made it
worthwhile.

-Henry

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before
  2019-02-03 21:08 ` Cág
@ 2019-02-03 22:20   ` Clem Cole
  2019-02-04  9:33     ` Marcus MERIGHI
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2019-02-03 22:20 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Cág; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 4:10 PM Cág <ca6c@bitmessage.ch> wrote:

> I wish I could say that.  I feel like nobody needs Fortran anymore, and
> my skills are being wasted.
>
FYI - the last time I saw the numbers, about 75-85% of the production at
CERN was Fortran.  This is very similar to the USA's high energy labs.  I
have not seen the numbers of the Darmstadt European space folks, but I
would not be surprised if they are much different than NASA's.   That was a
little lower, but the heavy supercomputer codes NASA uses are still very
much Fortran dominate.

Finding good Fortran programmers can be difficult.  Most today are from the
natural sciences (like was true in the 50s before we created 'Computer
Science'), but there are still lots of jobs if you know it.  But I suspect
that those jobs are going to be near campuses that support heavy science
types.
ᐧ

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before
  2019-02-03 22:14 ` Henry Bent
@ 2019-02-03 22:23   ` Clem Cole
  2019-02-04  2:16     ` Paul Winalski
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread
From: Clem Cole @ 2019-02-03 22:23 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Henry Bent; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

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On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 5:14 PM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

> This code was apparently so pervasive and long-lived that the GNU Fortran
> compiler added compatibility for DEC extensions less than two years ago, in
> version 7.  There must be enough demand for DEC's additions to have made it
> worthwhile.
>
Truth is most of the important ones went into Fortran-90 if I understand it
correctly (I'd trust Paul W.s comments if he knows).  Again, I'm not a
compiler guy, but I've been known to eat lunch with a few of them :-)

Clem
ᐧ

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before
  2019-02-03 22:23   ` Clem Cole
@ 2019-02-04  2:16     ` Paul Winalski
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Paul Winalski @ 2019-02-04  2:16 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Clem Cole; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society

On 2/3/19, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 5:14 PM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> This code was apparently so pervasive and long-lived that the GNU Fortran
>> compiler added compatibility for DEC extensions less than two years ago,
>> in
>> version 7.  There must be enough demand for DEC's additions to have made
>> it
>> worthwhile.
>>
> Truth is most of the important ones went into Fortran-90 if I understand it
> correctly (I'd trust Paul W.s comments if he knows).  Again, I'm not a
> compiler guy, but I've been known to eat lunch with a few of them :-)

The de facto standard for Fortran in the 1970s was IBM Fortran IV.
All of the important academic packages, both in the physical sciences
and the stats packages (SPSS, BMDP, etc.) used in Economics,
Psychology, Sociology, etc., were written in Fortran IV.  The ANSI
(later ISO) standards committee was more or less an irrelevancy.
Vendors added their own proprietary extensions to Fortran IV.  With
the VAX DEC was able to supplant IBM in the educational/research
marketplace by offering mainframe-level performance at a fraction of
the IBM price.  VAX Fortran, and its extensions to Fortran IV, thus
became the new de facto standard in the education/research market in
the early 1980s.  VAX Fortran did eventually implement all of the
features of Fortran 77, but for quite a long time we didn't bother
implementing the missing pieces because there was no market demand for
them.  As Clem said, the important VAX Fortran extensions to Fortran
IV have over time made their way into the ISO standard.

-Paul W.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before
  2019-02-03 22:20   ` Clem Cole
@ 2019-02-04  9:33     ` Marcus MERIGHI
  2019-02-04 12:32       ` Steffen Nurpmeso
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 9+ messages in thread
From: Marcus MERIGHI @ 2019-02-04  9:33 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS

Hello, 

clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole), 2019.02.03 (Sun) 23:20 (CET):
> On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 4:10 PM Cág <ca6c@bitmessage.ch> wrote:
> 
> > I wish I could say that.  I feel like nobody needs Fortran anymore, and
> > my skills are being wasted.
> >
> FYI - the last time I saw the numbers, about 75-85% of the production at
> CERN was Fortran.  This is very similar to the USA's high energy labs.  I
> have not seen the numbers of the Darmstadt European space folks, but I
> would not be surprised if they are much different than NASA's.   That was a

Sven Pruefer (Prüfer) mentions that Fortran is in heavy use at German
Space Operations Center:

https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9923-space_ops_101#t=735

Marcus

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread

* Re: [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before
  2019-02-04  9:33     ` Marcus MERIGHI
@ 2019-02-04 12:32       ` Steffen Nurpmeso
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 9+ messages in thread
From: Steffen Nurpmeso @ 2019-02-04 12:32 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS

Marcus MERIGHI wrote in <20190204093350.GC47448@tor.at>:
 |Hello, 
 |
 |clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole), 2019.02.03 (Sun) 23:20 (CET):
 |> On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 4:10 PM Cág <ca6c@bitmessage.ch> wrote:
 |> 
 |>> I wish I could say that.  I feel like nobody needs Fortran anymore, and
 |>> my skills are being wasted.
 |>>
 |> FYI - the last time I saw the numbers, about 75-85% of the production at
 |> CERN was Fortran.  This is very similar to the USA's high energy labs.  I
 |> have not seen the numbers of the Darmstadt European space folks, but I

The much larger site with "actual science" in it is located in
Oberpfaffenhofen, Bavaria.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 9+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2019-02-04 12:33 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 9+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2019-02-03 20:58 [TUHS] Commercial UNIX was other stuff before Clem Cole
2019-02-03 21:08 ` Cág
2019-02-03 22:20   ` Clem Cole
2019-02-04  9:33     ` Marcus MERIGHI
2019-02-04 12:32       ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2019-02-03 21:17 ` Larry McVoy
2019-02-03 22:14 ` Henry Bent
2019-02-03 22:23   ` Clem Cole
2019-02-04  2:16     ` Paul Winalski

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