[TUHS] Unix clones

[TUHS] Unix clones

[Wesley Parish]

The mention of UNOS a realtime "clone" of Unix in a recent thread raises a question for me. How many 
Unix clones are there?

(My interest in Unix was the result of a local computer magazine, Bits'n'Bytes in the late 80s and early 90s 
discussing two clones, Minix and Coherent in its Unix column. Then came Linux ...)

We've got a timeline (in several forms, in the 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD books and The Magic Garden, on Groklaw, 
and elsewhere) for Unix and its developments; has anyone done one for the clones?

Thanks

Wesley Parish

"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar

"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

[TUHS] Unix clones

[William Pechter]

Wesley Parish wrote:
> The mention of UNOS a realtime "clone" of Unix in a recent thread raises a question for me. How many 
> Unix clones are there?
>
> (My interest in Unix was the result of a local computer magazine, Bits'n'Bytes in the late 80s and early 90s 
> discussing two clones, Minix and Coherent in its Unix column. Then came Linux ...)
>
> We've got a timeline (in several forms, in the 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD books and The Magic Garden, on Groklaw, 
> and elsewhere) for Unix and its developments; has anyone done one for the clones?
>
> Thanks
>
> Wesley Parish
>
> "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
> Method for Guitar
>
> "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn
Idris from Whitesmiths once passed through my hands... I actually
skipped that one for UniPlus SysIII and SysV  on the
Perkin-Elmer 7350 box with a dip packaged  68000...

I ran Coherent until I got  the hardware to go 386-BSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD,
and Linux 0.99.xx (SLS and later Slackware).

Before the UniPlus I ran Xenix-86 on an AT&T 6300 with a Nec V30 (not a
6300+ 286 box).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix-like

Bill

[TUHS] Unix clones

[Wesley Parish]

Thanks. I'm thinking we could classify the Unix clones under three categories:
the commercial, such as UniFlex, Idris, UNOS
the academic, such as Minix and Tunix
and the hobbyist such as Linux at its beginning

Then it strikes me that that could probably apply to Unix at various stages in
its history:
v1, v2, v3 hobbyist v4?
v5, v6, *BSD academic
SysIII, SysV commercial

FWVLIW

Wesley Parish

Quoting William Pechter <pechter at gmail.com>:

> Wesley Parish wrote:
> > The mention of UNOS a realtime "clone" of Unix in a recent thread
> raises a question for me. How many 
> > Unix clones are there?
<snip>
> > Thanks
> >
> > Wesley Parish
<snip>
> Idris from Whitesmiths once passed through my hands... I actually
> skipped that one for UniPlus SysIII and SysV on the
> Perkin-Elmer 7350 box with a dip packaged 68000...
> 
> I ran Coherent until I got the hardware to go 386-BSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD,
> and Linux 0.99.xx (SLS and later Slackware).
> 
> Before the UniPlus I ran Xenix-86 on an AT&T 6300 with a Nec V30 (not a
> 6300+ 286 box).
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix-like
> 
> Bill
>  



"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar

"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

[TUHS] Unix clones

[Doug McIlroy]

> That's interesting that that sort of thing dates back (at least) to the Labs.

Research couldn't hold a candle to Development on making smooth transitions.
You don't take a telephone switch offline to change a file format or the like.
The development cycle used to be about three years: one year for design,
one for implementation, and one to build a hybrid to bridge the transition.
At 2AM on Sunday, you'd install the hybrid on one of the dual cross-checked
 processors at a time, so the switch was never interrupted. Later you'd
dispense with the hybrid the same way.

Doug

[TUHS] Unix clones

[Jason Stevens]

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Only if the compiler apologized for any errors in French and English.

On April 8, 2017 7:18:57 AM GMT+08:00, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:
>On Fri, 7 Apr 2017, Steve Johnson wrote:
>
>> There were also some B-inspired languages that got worked on:  eh? 
>> was a simpler version of B, and its follow-on was called zed.  Don't
>> know that they ever got out of the university, though...
>
>Heh, that's so Canadian it hurts.
>
>-uso.

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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[TUHS] Unix clones

[Steve Nickolas]

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On Fri, 7 Apr 2017, Steve Johnson wrote:

> There were also some B-inspired languages that got worked on:  eh? 
> was a simpler version of B, and its follow-on was called zed.  Don't
> know that they ever got out of the university, though...

Heh, that's so Canadian it hurts.

-uso.

[TUHS] Unix clones

[Steve Johnson]

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Thoth was under development at Waterloo when I was there, and I really
enjoyed talking with those folks.  They viewed the parts of the
system as inhabitants of a community and gave them clever names --
this led to some interesting discussions about the distribution of
functions in the kernel.   For example, I remember that the guy who
killed processes was called "Big Al", and when the process was dead
the "Undertaker" was called, etc.

There were also some B-inspired languages that got worked on:  eh? 
was a simpler version of B, and its follow-on was called zed.  Don't
know that they ever got out of the university, though...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Wesley Parish" <wes.parish@paradise.net.nz>
To:"Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com>
Cc:"The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
Sent:Fri, 07 Apr 2017 13:12:21 +1200 (NZST)
Subject:Re: [TUHS] Unix clones

 's/DNS/DNA/' - Not a problem. Thanks!

 I'd come across Thoth mentioned in an OS book at the U of Canterbury
(NZ) Science Library; they also 
 had a copy of the Tunis book. But I never took the time to read them.

 Getting them put into a time frame is useful - it gives an external
perspective to Salus' book, eg, this is 
 what some non-Unix folk thought of Unix at the time.

 Wesley Parish

 Quoting Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>:

 > s/DNS/DNA/ - dyslexia sucks....
 > 
 > On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 2:02 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > âtry-II sorry about that...â
 > >
 > >
 > > On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 9:18 PM, Wesley Parish
 > <wes.parish at paradise.net.nz>
 > > wrote:
 > >
 > >> The mention of UNOS a realtime "clone" of Unix in a recent
thread
 > raises
 > >> a question for me. How many
 > >> Unix clones are there?
 > >>
 > >
 > > âAn interesting question.... I'll take a shot at this in a
second,
 > note
 > > there is a Wikipedia page:
 > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Unix_
 > > variants that I don't fully agree with.
 > >
 > > The problem with all of this question is really depends where you
 > place
 > > which boundary on the following continuum:
 > >
 > > non-unix add-unix ideas trying to be
 > > unix might as well be unix research unix
 > > stream
 > >
 > > eg VMS eg Domain eg UNOS
 > > eg Sys V, BSD/386 & Linux Vx & BSD VAX
 > >
 > >
 > > Different people value different things. So here is my take from
the
 > > "cloned" systems I used/was basically aware....
 > >
 > > Idris was a V6 clone for the PDP-11, which I saw 1978ish. I can
say I
 > > was able to recompile code from v6 and it "just worked" so from a
 > user's
 > > standpoint it might as well has been. But the compilers and
 > assemblers
 > > were different and I never tried anything "hard"
 > >
 > > The first attempt to "clone" v7 that I knew about was in France,
and
 > > written in Pascal - I think at Ecole Tech in Paris? The name of
the
 > > project escapes me, but they presented the work in the 1979/80
winter
 > > USENIX (Blackhole) conference in Denver. There were no
proceedings in
 > > those days. I believe it also ran on the PDP-11, but I never ran
it
 > so; so
 > > I have no idea how easy it was to move things from Seventh
Edition.
 > But I
 > > also don't think they were working binary compatibility, so I
think
 > it
 > > landed more toward the center.
 > >
 > > The Cruds folks (Goldberg) wrote UNOS shortly there after (early
80s)
 > > It was definitely not UNIX although it tried to have be mostly.
We
 > had
 > > CRDS box at Masscomp and before I arrived they plan had been to
use it
 > get
 > > code working before the RTU was running. But the truth was it
failed
 > > because it was not UNIX. The 68000 vs Vax issues were far, far
less of
 > an
 > > issue than UNOS != UNIX. To Goldberg's credit, he did have a
couple
 > of
 > > cool things in it. I believe only system commercial systems that
used
 > > Kanodia & Reed's Sequences and Eventcounts, were UNOS, Apollo
Doman,
 > and
 > > Stellar's Stellix (I'm not sure about DG - they might have also
at
 > one
 > > point). But these were hidden in the kernel. Also the driver
model he
 > > had was different, so there was no gain writing drivers there.
 > >
 > > Mike Malcom & Dave Cheriton at Waterloo developed Thoth (Thoth -
 > Thucks),
 > > which was written in B, IIRC. Ran on the PDP-11 and was very fast
and
 > > light. It was the first "ukernel" UNIX-like/clone system.. Moving
 > code
 > > from V7 was pretty simple and there was attempt to make it good
enough
 > to
 > > make it easy to move things, but it was not trying to be UNIX so
it
 > was
 > > somewhere in the middle.
 > >
 > > The Tunis folks seem to have been next. This was more in the left
 > side
 > > of the page than the right. I think they did make run on the
PDP-11,
 > but
 > > I'm not so sure how easy it was to move code. If you used their
 > > concurrent Pascal, I suspect that code moved. But I'm not sure
how
 > easy it
 > > was to move a raw K&R "White Book" C code.
 > >
 > > CMU's Accent (which was redo of Rochester's RIG) came around the
same
 > > time. Like Tunis the system language was an extended Pascal and
in
 > fact
 > > the target was the triple drip Perq (aka the Pascalto). The C
 > compiler
 > > for it was late, and moving code was difficult, the UNIX
influence
 > was
 > > clear.
 > >
 > > Apollo's Aegis/Domain really came next - about 82/83 ish. Like
Accent
 > it
 > > was written in hacked up Pascal and the command were in
 > Ratfor/Fortran
 > > (from the SW Tool User's Group). C showed up reasonably early,
but
 > the
 > > focus did not start trying to be UNIX. In fact, they were very
 > > successfully and were getting ISV's to abandon VMS for them at a
very
 > good
 > > clip. UNIX clearly influenced the system, but it was not trying
to be
 > > UNIX, although moving code from BSD or V7 could be done fairly
 > easily.
 > >
 > > Tannebaum then did MINIX. Other than 8086 vs PDP-11-ism, it was a
 > pretty
 > > darned good clone. You could recompile and most things pretty
much
 > "just
 > > worked." He did not support ptrace and few other calls, but as a
basic
 > V7
 > > system running on a pure PDP PC, it was remarkably clean. It also
had
 > a
 > > large number of languages and it was a great teaching system -
which
 > is
 > > what Andy created it be. A problem was that UNIX had moved on by
the
 > > time Andy released it. So BSD & V8 were now pretty much the
definition
 > of
 > > "UNIX" - large address spaces were needed. As were the BSD tools
 > > extensions, such as vi, csh. Also UUCP was now very much in the
 > thing,
 > > and while it was a pure v7 clone, it was the lack of "tools" that
made
 > it
 > > not a good system to "use" and it's deficiencies out weighed the
 > value.
 > > Plus as discussed elsewhere, BSD/386 would appear.
 > >
 > > Steve Ward's crew at MIT created TRIX, which was a UNIX-like,
 > although
 > > instead of everything being a file, everything was a process.
This
 > was
 > > supposed to be the system that rms was originally going to use
for
 > GNU, but
 > > I never knew what happened. Noel might. I thought it was a cool
 > system,
 > > although it was a mono-kernel and around this time, most of the
OS
 > research
 > > had gone ukernel happy.
 > >
 > > Coherent was announcement and its provenance is questioned,
although
 > as
 > > discussed was eventually released from the AT&T official inquiry
and
 > you
 > > can look it your self. It was clearly a V7 clone for the PC and
was
 > more
 > > complete than Minix. I also think they supported the 386 fairly
 > quickly,
 > > which may have made it more interesting from a commercial
standpoint.
 > It
 > > also had more of the BSD tools available than Minix did when it
was
 > first
 > > released.
 > >
 > > CMU rewrites Accent to create Mach, but this time splices the BSD
 > kernel
 > > inside of it so that the 4.1BSD binaries "just work." So it's bit
 > UNIX
 > > and a new system all in one. So which is it? This system would
begat
 > > OSF/1 and eventually become Apple's Mac OS? I think its UNIX, but
one
 > can
 > > claim its not either....
 > >
 > > By this point in time the explosion occurs. You have Lion's book,
 > Andy's
 > > and Maury Bach's book on the street. he genie is clearly out of
the
 > bottle,
 > > and there is a ton of code out there and the DNS is getting all
mixed
 > up.
 > > Doug Comer does Xinu, Sheraton does V-kernel, Thoth is rewritten
to
 > become
 > > QNX, and a host of others I have not repeated. BSD's CSRG group
would
 > > break up, BSDi would be created and their 386 code come out. It
was
 > > clearly "might as well be" if it was not. Soon, Linus would start
 > with
 > > Minix and the rest is history on the generic line.
 > >
 > > Clem
 > >
 > >
 > 

 "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." -
Ferdinand Sor,
 Method for Guitar

 "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
Goldwyn

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[TUHS] Unix clones

[Wesley Parish]

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's/DNS/DNA/' - Not a problem. Thanks!

I'd come across Thoth mentioned in an OS book at the U of Canterbury (NZ) Science Library; they also 
had a copy of the Tunis book. But I never took the time to read them.

Getting them put into a time frame is useful - it gives an external perspective to Salus' book, eg, this is 
what some non-Unix folk thought of Unix at the time.

Wesley Parish

Quoting Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>:

> s/DNS/DNA/ - dyslexia sucks....
> 
> On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 2:02 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> > ​try-II sorry about that...​
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 9:18 PM, Wesley Parish
> <wes.parish at paradise.net.nz>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> The mention of UNOS a realtime "clone" of Unix in a recent thread
> raises
> >> a question for me. How many
> >> Unix clones are there?
> >>
> >
> > ​An interesting question.... I'll take a shot at this in a second,
> note
> > there is a Wikipedia page:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Unix_
> > variants that I don't fully agree with.
> >
> > The problem with all of this question is really depends where you
> place
> > which boundary on the following continuum:
> >
> > non-unix add-unix ideas trying to be
> > unix might as well be unix research unix
> > stream
> >
> > eg VMS eg Domain eg UNOS
> > eg Sys V, BSD/386 & Linux Vx & BSD VAX
> >
> >
> > Different people value different things. So here is my take from the
> > "cloned" systems I used/was basically aware....
> >
> > Idris was a V6 clone for the PDP-11, which I saw 1978ish. I can say I
> > was able to recompile code from v6 and it "just worked" so from a
> user's
> > standpoint it might as well has been. But the compilers and
> assemblers
> > were different and I never tried anything "hard"
> >
> > The first attempt to "clone" v7 that I knew about was in France, and
> > written in Pascal - I think at Ecole Tech in Paris? The name of the
> > project escapes me, but they presented the work in the 1979/80 winter
> > USENIX (Blackhole) conference in Denver. There were no proceedings in
> > those days. I believe it also ran on the PDP-11, but I never ran it
> so; so
> > I have no idea how easy it was to move things from Seventh Edition.
> But I
> > also don't think they were working binary compatibility, so I think
> it
> > landed more toward the center.
> >
> > The Cruds folks (Goldberg) wrote UNOS shortly there after (early 80s)
> > It was definitely not UNIX although it tried to have be mostly. We
> had
> > CRDS box at Masscomp and before I arrived they plan had been to use it
> get
> > code working before the RTU was running. But the truth was it failed
> > because it was not UNIX. The 68000 vs Vax issues were far, far less of
> an
> > issue than UNOS != UNIX. To Goldberg's credit, he did have a couple
> of
> > cool things in it. I believe only system commercial systems that used
> > Kanodia & Reed's Sequences and Eventcounts, were UNOS, Apollo Doman,
> and
> > Stellar's Stellix (I'm not sure about DG - they might have also at
> one
> > point). But these were hidden in the kernel. Also the driver model he
> > had was different, so there was no gain writing drivers there.
> >
> > Mike Malcom & Dave Cheriton at Waterloo developed Thoth (Thoth -
> Thucks),
> > which was written in B, IIRC. Ran on the PDP-11 and was very fast and
> > light. It was the first "ukernel" UNIX-like/clone system.. Moving
> code
> > from V7 was pretty simple and there was attempt to make it good enough
> to
> > make it easy to move things, but it was not trying to be UNIX so it
> was
> > somewhere in the middle.
> >
> > The Tunis folks seem to have been next. This was more in the left
> side
> > of the page than the right. I think they did make run on the PDP-11,
> but
> > I'm not so sure how easy it was to move code. If you used their
> > concurrent Pascal, I suspect that code moved. But I'm not sure how
> easy it
> > was to move a raw K&R "White Book" C code.
> >
> > CMU's Accent (which was redo of Rochester's RIG) came around the same
> > time. Like Tunis the system language was an extended Pascal and in
> fact
> > the target was the triple drip Perq (aka the Pascalto). The C
> compiler
> > for it was late, and moving code was difficult, the UNIX influence
> was
> > clear.
> >
> > Apollo's Aegis/Domain really came next - about 82/83 ish. Like Accent
> it
> > was written in hacked up Pascal and the command were in
> Ratfor/Fortran
> > (from the SW Tool User's Group). C showed up reasonably early, but
> the
> > focus did not start trying to be UNIX. In fact, they were very
> > successfully and were getting ISV's to abandon VMS for them at a very
> good
> > clip. UNIX clearly influenced the system, but it was not trying to be
> > UNIX, although moving code from BSD or V7 could be done fairly
> easily.
> >
> > Tannebaum then did MINIX. Other than 8086 vs PDP-11-ism, it was a
> pretty
> > darned good clone. You could recompile and most things pretty much
> "just
> > worked." He did not support ptrace and few other calls, but as a basic
> V7
> > system running on a pure PDP PC, it was remarkably clean. It also had
> a
> > large number of languages and it was a great teaching system - which
> is
> > what Andy created it be. A problem was that UNIX had moved on by the
> > time Andy released it. So BSD & V8 were now pretty much the definition
> of
> > "UNIX" - large address spaces were needed. As were the BSD tools
> > extensions, such as vi, csh. Also UUCP was now very much in the
> thing,
> > and while it was a pure v7 clone, it was the lack of "tools" that made
> it
> > not a good system to "use" and it's deficiencies out weighed the
> value.
> > Plus as discussed elsewhere, BSD/386 would appear.
> >
> > Steve Ward's crew at MIT created TRIX, which was a UNIX-like,
> although
> > instead of everything being a file, everything was a process. This
> was
> > supposed to be the system that rms was originally going to use for
> GNU, but
> > I never knew what happened. Noel might. I thought it was a cool
> system,
> > although it was a mono-kernel and around this time, most of the OS
> research
> > had gone ukernel happy.
> >
> > Coherent was announcement and its provenance is questioned, although
> as
> > discussed was eventually released from the AT&T official inquiry and
> you
> > can look it your self. It was clearly a V7 clone for the PC and was
> more
> > complete than Minix. I also think they supported the 386 fairly
> quickly,
> > which may have made it more interesting from a commercial standpoint.
> It
> > also had more of the BSD tools available than Minix did when it was
> first
> > released.
> >
> > CMU rewrites Accent to create Mach, but this time splices the BSD
> kernel
> > inside of it so that the 4.1BSD binaries "just work." So it's bit
> UNIX
> > and a new system all in one. So which is it? This system would begat
> > OSF/1 and eventually become Apple's Mac OS? I think its UNIX, but one
> can
> > claim its not either....
> >
> > By this point in time the explosion occurs. You have Lion's book,
> Andy's
> > and Maury Bach's book on the street. he genie is clearly out of the
> bottle,
> > and there is a ton of code out there and the DNS is getting all mixed
> up.
> > Doug Comer does Xinu, Sheraton does V-kernel, Thoth is rewritten to
> become
> > QNX, and a host of others I have not repeated. BSD's CSRG group would
> > break up, BSDi would be created and their 386 code come out. It was
> > clearly "might as well be" if it was not. Soon, Linus would start
> with
> > Minix and the rest is history on the generic line.
> >
> > Clem
> >
> >
>  



"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar

"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

[TUHS] Unix clones

[Clem Cole]

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s/DNS/DNA/    - dyslexia sucks....

On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 2:02 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> ​try-II sorry about that...​
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 9:18 PM, Wesley Parish <wes.parish at paradise.net.nz>
>  wrote:
>
>> The mention of UNOS a realtime "clone" of Unix in a recent thread raises
>> a question for me. How many
>> Unix clones are there?
>>
>
> ​An interesting question....   I'll take a shot at this in a second, note
> there is a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Unix_
> variants that I don't fully agree with.
>
> The problem with all of this question is really depends where you place
> which boundary on the following continuum:
>
> non-unix                      add-unix ideas               trying to be
> unix              might as well be unix                       research unix
> stream
>
> eg  VMS                            eg Domain                    eg UNOS
>                       eg Sys V, BSD/386 & Linux              Vx & BSD VAX
>
>
> Different people value different things.  So here is my take from the
> "cloned" systems I used/was basically aware....
>
> Idris was a V6 clone for the PDP-11, which I saw 1978ish.   I can say I
> was able to recompile code from v6 and it "just worked"  so from a user's
> standpoint it might as well has been.   But the compilers and assemblers
> were different and I never tried anything "hard"
>
> The first attempt to "clone" v7 that I knew about was in France, and
> written in Pascal - I think at Ecole Tech in Paris?  The name of the
> project escapes me, but they presented the work in the 1979/80 winter
> USENIX (Blackhole) conference in Denver.  There were no proceedings in
> those days.  I believe it also ran on the PDP-11, but I never ran it so; so
> I have no idea how easy it was to move things from Seventh Edition.   But I
> also don't think they were working binary compatibility, so I think it
> landed more toward the center.
>
> The Cruds folks (Goldberg) wrote UNOS shortly there after (early 80s)
>  It was definitely not UNIX although it tried to have be mostly.   We had
> CRDS box at Masscomp and before I arrived they plan had been to use it get
> code working before the RTU was running.   But the truth was it failed
> because it was not UNIX.   The 68000 vs Vax issues were far, far less of an
> issue than UNOS != UNIX.  To Goldberg's credit, he did have a couple of
> cool things in it. I believe only system commercial systems that used
> Kanodia & Reed's Sequences and Eventcounts, were UNOS, Apollo Doman, and
> Stellar's Stellix (I'm not sure about DG - they might have also at one
> point).   But these were hidden in the kernel.  Also the driver model he
> had was different, so there was no gain writing drivers there.
>
> Mike Malcom & Dave Cheriton at Waterloo developed Thoth (Thoth - Thucks),
> which was written in B, IIRC.  Ran on the PDP-11 and was very fast and
> light.  It was the first "ukernel" UNIX-like/clone system..  Moving code
> from V7 was pretty simple and there was attempt to make it good enough to
> make it easy to move things, but it was not trying to be UNIX so it was
> somewhere in the middle.
>
> The Tunis folks seem to have been next.   This was more in the left side
> of the page than the right.   I think they did make run on the PDP-11, but
> I'm not so sure how easy it was to move code.   If you used their
> concurrent Pascal, I suspect that code moved.  But I'm not sure how easy it
> was to move a raw K&R "White Book" C code.
>
> CMU's Accent (which was redo of Rochester's RIG) came around the same
> time.   Like Tunis the system language was an extended Pascal and in fact
> the target was the triple drip Perq (aka the Pascalto).   The C compiler
> for it was late, and moving code was difficult, the UNIX influence was
> clear.
>
> Apollo's Aegis/Domain really came next - about 82/83 ish.   Like Accent it
> was written in hacked up Pascal and the command were in Ratfor/Fortran
> (from the SW Tool User's Group).    C showed up reasonably early, but the
> focus did not start trying to be UNIX.  In fact, they were very
> successfully and were getting ISV's to abandon VMS for them at a very good
> clip.   UNIX clearly influenced the system, but it was not trying to be
> UNIX, although moving code from BSD or V7 could be done fairly easily.
>
> Tannebaum then did MINIX.   Other than 8086 vs PDP-11-ism, it was a pretty
> darned good clone.    You could recompile and most things pretty much "just
> worked."   He did not support ptrace and few other calls, but as a basic V7
> system running on a pure PDP PC, it was remarkably clean.  It also had a
> large number of languages and it was a great teaching system - which is
> what Andy created it be.    A problem was that UNIX had moved on by the
> time Andy released it.   So BSD & V8 were now pretty much the definition of
> "UNIX" - large address spaces were needed.  As were the BSD tools
> extensions, such as vi, csh.   Also UUCP was now very much in the thing,
> and while it was a pure v7 clone, it was the lack of "tools" that made it
> not a good system to "use" and it's deficiencies out weighed the value.
> Plus as discussed elsewhere, BSD/386 would appear.
>
> Steve Ward's crew at MIT created TRIX, which was a UNIX-like, although
> instead of everything being a file, everything was a process.  This was
> supposed to be the system that rms was originally going to use for GNU, but
> I never knew what happened.   Noel might.  I thought it was a cool system,
> although it was a mono-kernel and around this time, most of the OS research
> had gone ukernel happy.
>
> Coherent was announcement and its provenance is questioned, although as
> discussed was eventually released from the AT&T official inquiry and you
> can look it your self.   It was clearly a V7 clone for the PC and was more
> complete than Minix.  I also think they supported the 386 fairly quickly,
> which may have made it more interesting from a commercial standpoint.  It
> also had more of the BSD tools available than Minix did when it was first
> released.
>
> CMU rewrites Accent to create Mach, but this time splices the BSD kernel
> inside of it so that the 4.1BSD binaries "just work."   So it's bit UNIX
> and a new system all in one.  So which is it?   This system would begat
> OSF/1 and eventually become Apple's Mac OS?   I think its UNIX, but one can
> claim its not either....
>
> By this point in time the explosion occurs.   You have Lion's book, Andy's
> and Maury Bach's book on the street. he genie is clearly out of the bottle,
> and there is a ton of code out there and the DNS is getting all mixed up.
> Doug Comer does Xinu, Sheraton does V-kernel, Thoth is rewritten to become
> QNX, and  a host of others I have not repeated.  BSD's CSRG group would
> break up, BSDi would be created and their 386 code come out.   It was
> clearly "might as well be" if it was not.  Soon, Linus would start with
> Minix and the rest is history on the generic line.
>
> Clem
>
>
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[TUHS] Unix clones

[Clem Cole]

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[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 6864 bytes --]

​try-II sorry about that...​


On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 9:18 PM, Wesley Parish <wes.parish at paradise.net.nz>
 wrote:

> The mention of UNOS a realtime "clone" of Unix in a recent thread raises a
> question for me. How many
> Unix clones are there?
>

​An interesting question....   I'll take a shot at this in a second, note
there is a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Category:Unix_variants that I don't fully agree with.

The problem with all of this question is really depends where you place
which boundary on the following continuum:

non-unix                      add-unix ideas               trying to be
unix              might as well be unix                       research unix
stream

eg  VMS                            eg Domain                    eg UNOS
                    eg Sys V, BSD/386 & Linux              Vx & BSD VAX


Different people value different things.  So here is my take from the
"cloned" systems I used/was basically aware....

Idris was a V6 clone for the PDP-11, which I saw 1978ish.   I can say I was
able to recompile code from v6 and it "just worked"  so from a user's
standpoint it might as well has been.   But the compilers and assemblers
were different and I never tried anything "hard"

The first attempt to "clone" v7 that I knew about was in France, and
written in Pascal - I think at Ecole Tech in Paris?  The name of the
project escapes me, but they presented the work in the 1979/80 winter
USENIX (Blackhole) conference in Denver.  There were no proceedings in
those days.  I believe it also ran on the PDP-11, but I never ran it so; so
I have no idea how easy it was to move things from Seventh Edition.   But I
also don't think they were working binary compatibility, so I think it
landed more toward the center.

The Cruds folks (Goldberg) wrote UNOS shortly there after (early 80s)
 It was definitely not UNIX although it tried to have be mostly.   We had
CRDS box at Masscomp and before I arrived they plan had been to use it get
code working before the RTU was running.   But the truth was it failed
because it was not UNIX.   The 68000 vs Vax issues were far, far less of an
issue than UNOS != UNIX.  To Goldberg's credit, he did have a couple of
cool things in it. I believe only system commercial systems that used
Kanodia & Reed's Sequences and Eventcounts, were UNOS, Apollo Doman, and
Stellar's Stellix (I'm not sure about DG - they might have also at one
point).   But these were hidden in the kernel.  Also the driver model he
had was different, so there was no gain writing drivers there.

Mike Malcom & Dave Cheriton at Waterloo developed Thoth (Thoth - Thucks),
which was written in B, IIRC.  Ran on the PDP-11 and was very fast and
light.  It was the first "ukernel" UNIX-like/clone system..  Moving code
from V7 was pretty simple and there was attempt to make it good enough to
make it easy to move things, but it was not trying to be UNIX so it was
somewhere in the middle.

The Tunis folks seem to have been next.   This was more in the left side of
the page than the right.   I think they did make run on the PDP-11, but I'm
not so sure how easy it was to move code.   If you used their concurrent
Pascal, I suspect that code moved.  But I'm not sure how easy it was to
move a raw K&R "White Book" C code.

CMU's Accent (which was redo of Rochester's RIG) came around the same time.
  Like Tunis the system language was an extended Pascal and in fact the
target was the triple drip Perq (aka the Pascalto).   The C compiler for it
was late, and moving code was difficult, the UNIX influence was clear.

Apollo's Aegis/Domain really came next - about 82/83 ish.   Like Accent it
was written in hacked up Pascal and the command were in Ratfor/Fortran
(from the SW Tool User's Group).    C showed up reasonably early, but the
focus did not start trying to be UNIX.  In fact, they were very
successfully and were getting ISV's to abandon VMS for them at a very good
clip.   UNIX clearly influenced the system, but it was not trying to be
UNIX, although moving code from BSD or V7 could be done fairly easily.

Tannebaum then did MINIX.   Other than 8086 vs PDP-11-ism, it was a pretty
darned good clone.    You could recompile and most things pretty much "just
worked."   He did not support ptrace and few other calls, but as a basic V7
system running on a pure PDP PC, it was remarkably clean.  It also had a
large number of languages and it was a great teaching system - which is
what Andy created it be.    A problem was that UNIX had moved on by the
time Andy released it.   So BSD & V8 were now pretty much the definition of
"UNIX" - large address spaces were needed.  As were the BSD tools
extensions, such as vi, csh.   Also UUCP was now very much in the thing,
and while it was a pure v7 clone, it was the lack of "tools" that made it
not a good system to "use" and it's deficiencies out weighed the value.
Plus as discussed elsewhere, BSD/386 would appear.

Steve Ward's crew at MIT created TRIX, which was a UNIX-like, although
instead of everything being a file, everything was a process.  This was
supposed to be the system that rms was originally going to use for GNU, but
I never knew what happened.   Noel might.  I thought it was a cool system,
although it was a mono-kernel and around this time, most of the OS research
had gone ukernel happy.

Coherent was announcement and its provenance is questioned, although as
discussed was eventually released from the AT&T official inquiry and you
can look it your self.   It was clearly a V7 clone for the PC and was more
complete than Minix.  I also think they supported the 386 fairly quickly,
which may have made it more interesting from a commercial standpoint.  It
also had more of the BSD tools available than Minix did when it was first
released.

CMU rewrites Accent to create Mach, but this time splices the BSD kernel
inside of it so that the 4.1BSD binaries "just work."   So it's bit UNIX
and a new system all in one.  So which is it?   This system would begat
OSF/1 and eventually become Apple's Mac OS?   I think its UNIX, but one can
claim its not either....

By this point in time the explosion occurs.   You have Lion's book, Andy's
and Maury Bach's book on the street. he genie is clearly out of the bottle,
and there is a ton of code out there and the DNS is getting all mixed up.
Doug Comer does Xinu, Sheraton does V-kernel, Thoth is rewritten to become
QNX, and  a host of others I have not repeated.  BSD's CSRG group would
break up, BSDi would be created and their 386 code come out.   It was
clearly "might as well be" if it was not.  Soon, Linus would start with
Minix and the rest is history on the generic line.

Clem
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[TUHS] Unix clones

[Clem Cole]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 6822 bytes --]

On Wed, Apr 5, 2017 at 9:18 PM, Wesley Parish <wes.parish at paradise.net.nz>
wrote:

> The mention of UNOS a realtime "clone" of Unix in a recent thread raises a
> question for me. How many
> Unix clones are there?
>

​An interesting question....   I'll take a shot at this in a second, note
there is a Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Unix_variants that I don't fully
agree with.

The problem with all of this question is really depends where you place
which boundary on the following continuum:

non-unix                      add-unix ideas               trying to be
unix              might as well be unix                       research unix
stream

eg  VMS                            eg Domain                    eg UNOS
                    eg Sys V, BSD/386 & Linux              Vx & BSD VAX


Different people value different things.  So here is my take from the
"cloned" systems I used/was basically aware....

Idris was a V6 clone for the PDP-11, which I saw 1978ish.   I can say I was
able to recompile code from v6 and it "just worked"  so from a user's
standpoint it might as well has been.   But the compilers and assemblers
were different and I never tried anything "hard"

The first attempt to "clone" v7 that I knew about was in France, and
written in Pascal - I think at Ecole Tech in Paris?  The name of the
project escapes me, but they presented the work in the 1979/80 winter
USENIX (Blackhole) conference in Denver.  There were no proceedings in
those days.  I believe it also ran on the PDP-11, but I never ran it so; so
I have no idea how easy it was to move things from Seventh Edition.   But I
also don't think they were working binary compatibility, so I think it
landed more toward the center.

The Cruds folks (Goldberg) wrote UNOS shortly there after (early 80s)
 It was definitely not UNIX although it tried to have be mostly.   We had
CRDS box at Masscomp and before I arrived they plan had been to use it get
code working before the RTU was running.   But the truth was it failed
because it was not UNIX.   The 68000 vs Vax issues were far, far less of an
issue than UNOS != UNIX.  To Goldberg's credit, he did have a couple of
cool things in it. I believe only system commercial systems that used
Kanodia & Reed's Sequences and Eventcounts, were UNOS, Apollo Doman, and
Stellar's Stellix (I'm not sure about DG - they might have also at one
point).   But these were hidden in the kernel.  Also the driver model he
had was different, so there was no gain writing drivers there.

Mike Malcom & Dave Cheriton at Waterloo developed Thoth (Thoth - Thucks),
which was written in B, IIRC.  Ran on the PDP-11 and was very fast and
light.  It was the first "ukernel" UNIX-like/clone system..  Moving code
from V7 was pretty simple and there was attempt to make it good enough to
make it easy to move things, but it was not trying to be UNIX so it was
somewhere in the middle.

The Tunis folks seem to have been next.   This was more in the left side of
the page than the right.   I think they did make run on the PDP-11, but I'm
not so sure how easy it was to move code.   If you used their concurrent
Pascal, I suspect that code moved.  But I'm not sure how easy it was to
move a raw K&R "White Book" C code.

CMU's Accent (which was redo of Rochester's RIG) came around the same time.
  Like Tunis the system language was an extended Pascal and in fact the
target was the triple drip Perq (aka the Pascalto).   The C compiler for it
was late, and moving code was difficult, the UNIX influence was clear.

Apollo's Aegis/Domain really came next - about 82/83 ish.   Like Accent it
was written in hacked up Pascal and the command were in Ratfor/Fortran
(from the SW Tool User's Group).    C showed up reasonably early, but the
focus did not start trying to be UNIX.  In fact, they were very
successfully and were getting ISV's to abandon VMS for them at a very good
clip.   UNIX clearly influenced the system, but it was not trying to be
UNIX, although moving code from BSD or V7 could be done fairly easily.

Tannebaum then did MINIX.   Other than 8086 vs PDP-11-ism, it was a pretty
darned good clone.    You could recompile and most things pretty much "just
worked."   He did not support ptrace and few other calls, but as a basic V7
system running on a pure PDP PC, it was remarkably clean.  It also had a
large number of languages and it was a great teaching system - which is
what Andy created it be.    A problem was that UNIX had moved on by the
time Andy released it.   So BSD & V8 were now pretty much the definition of
"UNIX" - large address spaces were needed.  As were the BSD tools
extensions, such as vi, csh.   Also UUCP was now very much in the thing,
and while it was a pure v7 clone, it was the lack of "tools" that made it
not a good system to "use" and it's deficiencies out weighed the value.
Plus as discussed elsewhere, BSD/386 would appear.

Steve Ward's crew at MIT created TRIX, which was a UNIX-like, although
instead of everything being a file, everything was a process.  This was
supposed to be the system that rms was originally going to use for GNU, but
I never knew what happened.   Noel might.  I thought it was a cool system,
although it was a mono-kernel and around this time, most of the OS research
had gone ukernel happy.

Coherent was announcement and its provenance is questioned, although as
discussed was eventually released from the AT&T official inquiry and you
can look it your self.   It was clearly a V7 clone for the PC and was more
complete than Minix.  I also think they supported the 386 fairly quickly,
which may have made it more interesting from a commercial standpoint.  It
also had more of the BSD tools available than Minix did when it was first
released.

CMU rewrites Accent to create Mach, but this time splices the BSD kernel
inside of it so that the 4.1BSD binaries "just work."   So it's bit UNIX
and a new system all in one.  So which is it?   This system would begat
OSF/1 and eventually become Apple's Mac OS?   I think its UNIX, but one can
claim its not either....

By this point in time the explosion occurs.   You have Lion's book, Andy's
and Maury Bach's book on the street. he genie is clearly out of the bottle,
and there is a ton of code out there and the DNS is getting all mixed up.
Doug Comer does Xinu, Sheraton does V-kernel, Thoth is rewritten to become
QNX, and  a host of others I have not repeated.  BSD's CSRG group would
break up, BSDi would be created and their 386 code come out.   It was
clearly "might as well be" if it was not.  Soon, Linus would start with
Minix and the rest is history on the generic line.

Clem
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