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UNIX Advertising From Way-back-when
Doug Muth writes: "I found this advertisement
over on Dennis Ritchie's Web site. It's an advertisement for a UNIX system back from 1981 when VAX-11 and PDP-11 systems were still being used. I wonder if Ritchie ever thought UNIX would get this popular?"
5 to 40 terminals. More than 2000 systems in use outside the Bell System (as it was back then). More than 100 user utilities (Emacs probably has lisp versions of more than that now).
Oh, and PWB "allows up to 48 programmers to simultaneously create and maintain software for many computer applications." Think about that next time you do an anonCVS update of your favorite program!
Here's another bit of UNIX history from Ritchie's site: a brief history of the UNIX pipe.
Finding God in a Dog
This sounds like a job for Microsoft Windows NT! After all, it did say it supports up to 200 users... Now if you can only forget about the "without costly hardware part," I think Microsoft could use this as a new ad campaign.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
I'm assuming Dennis Ritchie had originally considered his operating system as just a powerful, utilitarian, data-processing operating system. He probably never imagined so many geeks would take a liking to his creation. He also probably hated using its esoteric interface in the beginning, but had grown more accustomed to it as opposed to the rest of the operating systems which he used before the implementation of his own OS.
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-- Slashdot sucks.
Do those bozos really think that this makes anybody want their product? Anybody except a certain... ah, leave that for the trollers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I knew there was a better use than 'trek on a c shell. Err, about late 70s that is. -d
in only a half hour. How's that for a Unix advertisment?
Anyway my point is that a mini like a PDP11 that could support 30 timeshared users for tens of thousands of $$ WAS a big deal.
...and mirror User Friendly on /.
All of the links have been the same for the past week...
THANK YOU! I've been saying that for years! (See sig.)
Unfortunately, the average Slashdot user is so infatuated with his Linux(/BSD/HURD) plaything that he won't stop for a moment to consider the horrible horrible flaws which plague the entire Unix family (and relatives, and clones, and anything based on the Unix architecture or on its language of choice, the static, low-level "portable assembly" C). Even more sadly, he will steadfastly hold close to his belief that anyone who doesn't like Unix (or C) must be an evil Microsoftie, and in doing so will pass on the opportunity to learn that there are better things and life than the Beast from New Jersey.
Ah well - I digress. Just take a moment to look at the critique of C/C++ on the site for the Tunes project, if you will... and, as I say below, think twice before moderating the crap out of us both.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Wow, does this include ls? And no maintenance or tech support agreements. Right there in the same size text as everything else. I think it shows quite a bit about the state of programmers and admins today. That would never fly now- the blurb would be in 4 pt font on the bottom, and nobody (in business where money matters) now tries that hard to learn enough about a system to fix it on their own.
Ah well, still a fun ad to look at today.
Jason
1981 you say...well, we still use a VAX/11 and quite a few PDP 11's where I work believe or not, although the VAX is used turned on once a month to do a backup, we keep it cause it might be needed to compile some old sources on, and we have some systems running 24/7 on the PDP 11's. Time to upgrade I think!
The computer research division is home to such UNIX "rock stars" such as Ritchie, Thompson, Kernhigan.
The sheer amount of talent and respect generated by Bell Labs is staggering.
Now, all you punks have gone and 'slashdotted' thier web server! I hope you're happy, you... you bastards!
Well, back in my day, when we used abucuses (abucii?)and such, we'd send our programs off to be typed onto punch cards, then we'd get them back and we'd send them off to be actually run and then we'd get them back and our program hadn't worked! So we'd have to walk two miles to the mainframe in deep snow. Uphill! And there was none of this MTV crap back then, either.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
yep. i second this fully. for all those of us plotting to destroy UNIX, this book is a must read. really.
Are you describing old Unix or Windows 2000? :-)
The womb.
Specs:" My PDP-11/20 was, like many machines, sold to me via the University of Wisconsin surplus program. This particular machine happened to be originally located in the Electrical Engineering Department real-time control lab that was sponsered by Professor Richard Marleau. Inside the panel, just above the CPU, is an RC11 disk drive. The RC11 is a 65K word (128 K byte) fixed head disk drive. After all these years (the system was first purchased around 1970) it still works!"
Also this PDP-11/45 sports such wonderfull specs as:"The PDP-11/45 is of approximately the same vintage as the PDP-11/20, but is a much more sophisticated machine. For one thing, it was a micro-coded CPU. It had robust memory management, not seen in microcomputers from Intel until the 80386. It could also support two separate buses: one primarily intended for memory, and the second generally used for peripherals. This is not unlike today's "local bus" PC's. I cut my teeth on Unix on a PDP-11/45 system at the University of Wisconsin in 1976 along with my friends Paul and Hannes (among others)."
This PDP-11/05 graphics system. " The GT40 was a graphic system, often used as a graphic terminal for DEC's PDP-10 and PDP-20 mainframe systems. The CPU was a PDP-11/05, but used the green color scheme of DEC's graphic systems rather than the magenta color scheme normally found on PDP-11's. The GT-40's main claim to fame is probably the famous Lunar Lander game, written by Jack Burness, as a consultant to Digital at the time."
___
Actually AT&T really blew the whole Unix thing, and this is why we have BSD and tux. It succeeded despite the evil death star.
And my first computer was a Tab 132 dumb terminal that I dialed into the school's vaxen with.
My first computer with an OS was a used AT&T 3b1 that I didn't retire until about 95.
TastesLikeHErringFlavoredChicken
on a scale of 1 to 10 I'll give links to Mr. Ritchie's pages 11 herring heads. This is what the web is ment for...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Any given operating system when pushed on a user who is better off using something else.. sucks..
In short Unix and Windows both do suck...
But understand.. It's not becouse the operating system is of poor quality...
A system that can do anything waists resorces being prepaired to do anything...
Most systems CAN do anything but require you DO something first before it accually has that feature. It would be a waist it have every posable feature active on any given system.
Ok Windows is preinstalled on PCs so any given PC user has paid for Windows (unless they built the PC themselfs) but why would this apply to Unix? Surely you must go out of your way to install Unix or buy a machine designed to run Unix. You don't get Unix suffed down your shorts... do you?
Rember unlike Windows Unix is first and formost a multi-user system. While a Linux PC is most likely used by one user most Unix boxes are set up expecting at least 4 users (4 users and 1 admin so 5 terminals).
This means at least 4 users got no say. Often it's a great deal more than just 4 users.
In todays computing environments however a personal system is the prefeared method. Each user may pick his own environment his own wallpaper his own operating system. Ideally....
However far to often the ideal dose not translate into reality and a user who would be better off using Unix or Mac gets stuck with Windows becouse someone else some place else is affrade of anything else.
Such a person should have never been given the job of office lan admin.
Anyone who is affrade of a Sun Sparc in the network sould be replaced....
In short... any operating system potentally sucks... if I pimp Linux to a newbe then Linux sucks.. if a salesmen whines "But EVERYONE uses Windows..." then Windows sucks... If a Mac user says "Linux? Bah.. I use Mac.." then Mac Sucks.. if a Solarus user says "Your just a wanabe techie becouse you don't use Solarus" then Solarus sucks... of a BSD person says "BSD is better" BSD Sucks... If my sister says "Commodore 64s are the best system out" she is joking..
Basicly no system is ideal for all people and while usually people don't care about an operating system that dosn't work for them. But thats only becouse they'll never use it.
As long as a person can pick the system that is best suted for them then everything is cool. Any time someone takes that choice away the system they are pimping.. simply put... sucks...
I don't actually exist.
It's funny how even the ads keep scaling down. I remember seeing a magazine ad in the 1980's that showed a big raised-floor computer room, empty except for a single PC with a big bundle of serial cables coming out the back. The caption: INSTANT MAINFRAME. JUST ADD SCO.
The more things change...
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Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
As soon as slashdot posts a story, the site usually goes down, or least get's slow, and does not answer requests.
It seems to me that their is enough bandwith among some slashdot users to setup a kind of automatic temporary web mirror system.
The mirrorer's machine would one a small script that would listen for requests from slashdot and then would scrape the info from the other site. This could all happen before the story was even posted.
Of course if the site was running asp, cf, php, pearl, java servlets, or some other language generating the pages it would be harder. But chances are those kinds of sites would have the bandwith needed, or closer to then some of the random static html pages we see here from time to time.
addict (-dkt) v. tr. addicted, addicting, addicts. 1.To devote or give (oneself) habitually o
Right. Here in NZ the big old universities had B6700's, but the new boy Waikato got a PDP11/70. I used that in 1981 and it ran about 40 - 50 users in 768 KB of core, on the RSTS/E oprating system.
By the next year we had a VAX 11/780 which ran about the same number of users in 1 MB or 1.5 MB (I forget) on VAX/VMS.
During the day both those systems were slloooowwww. But in the small hours with only half a dozen people using them they were really quite snappy -- certainly better than any PC you could get at the time.
And what a solution! Post links to the Unix Haters Handbook, rant and rave about how you hate it's archaism, even equate every Unix supporter to someone who will slam you without reason.
Well, thanks to you're wonderful and informative post that informed me of my options and alternatives to *nix derivatives, I've decided you do indeed deserve to be branded. Microserf I won't say, strange you would assume so. But like I said, you named so many alternative ways to think about OS'es in general that I am forever in your debt.
Now, seriously now, your post has about as much base as the average '[insert name here] sucks!' post. Try this on for size:
Unfortunately, the average MacWorld reader is so infatuated with their MacOS 9 plaything that they won't stop to consider the horrible horrible flaws that plague the entire MacOS family. Even more sadly, he will steadfastly hold close to his belief that anyone who doesn't like MacOS must be an evil Microserf, and in doing so will pass on the opportunity to learn that there are things better then the Beast from Apple.
Replace the term MacOS recursively with Windows. Or DOS. Or OS/2. Or anything. Next time, be constructive. At least the link you provided was a decent look at languages.
The following is my stance on this issue: If Unix is indeed the wrong way to do things, it's a wonder it's survived for so many years and is now coming back not only in the free OS'es but in Apple's new commercial offering for the home user. Unix itself may not be what's so wonderful, but the fact that there is a platform with standards behind it (POSIX) that allows programmers to write once and port many ways may be what's so wonderful.
But then again, who would have thought that computers would be so popular?
In '81 I was spending the summer sitting in a windowless lab hacking in Ratfor (a preprocessor that added C like control flow structures to Fortran IV) on a PDP-11 for controlling experiments and analyzing data; a lot of which involved writing routines to rescue data for ham handed graduate students who kept putting the damned RK05 disk packs in crooked. Didn't have a Unix account, but I did screw around on Multics for fun. A few years later I got to work on Unix System III, which was nice and clean, but god it needed a symbolic debugger (adb only gave hex addresses).
Gosh, remember what it was like to get up and go out for a sub and sit on a park bench while your computer compiled linked a program that was altogether maybe a couple of K lines long? One misplaced semicolon could cost you hours. The first time I saw a compile run that did more than a couple of lines per second I was in awe.
Remember when Usenet primarily ran over UUCP on 1200 baud modems?
Remember when you could swagger into a job interview with absolutely no credentials and only a tiny bit of tenuously related experience and have them eating out the palm of your hand? I guess some things don't change that much.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The post he was replying to got hidden, in part because your threshold is either set at 0 or 1...anywho the infamous Trollmastah comes in at a -1. If you reset your threshold to -1 and hit change the conversation will be quite a bit different...
Some brave soul is mirroring the image.
http://reltheon.yi.org/~rgomes/unixad.htm
As far as I know, NetBSD hasn't been ported to pacemakers yet, but that's next on the list.
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47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
I think the cartoon aim's to be kind of New Yorker-ish. Something the bosses of yesteryear would associate with class and sophistication.
In other words, they're trying to associate themselves with James Thurber's wit without bothering to produce any new wit of their own.
It seem incomprehensible because nobody would try to sell something by making associating it with a "classy" magazine now. In twenty years, the current dot-com ads which try to borrow some of the hip by adopting a post modernist GenX look without the incisive irony will look equally pathetic, I assure you.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I just saw this on UF a few hours ago. oh well, it's still cool.
even equate every Unix supporter to someone who will slam you without reason.
No, I equated the average Unix supporter to someone who will slam me without reason. I have found this to be the case, in general.
Unfortunately, the average MacWorld reader is so infatuated with their MacOS 9 plaything that they won't stop to consider the horrible horrible flaws that plague the entire MacOS family. Even more sadly, he will steadfastly hold close to his belief that anyone who doesn't like MacOS must be an evil Microserf, and in doing so will pass on the opportunity to learn that there are things better then the Beast from Apple.
That's actually a very good look at the average Mac user. (And I'm using a Mac myself right now.)
Next time, be constructive. At least the link you provided was a decent look at languages.
Actually, the entire tunes.org site makes for excellent reading, and you can drop by at OPN #tunes anytime for a rational discussion on why Unix sucks. (The site linked to by the OP also has a lot of text which you might consider constructive.)
If Unix is indeed the wrong way to do things, it's a wonder it's survived for so many years and is now coming back not only in the free OS'es but in Apple's new commercial offering for the home user.
Why? It's Gresham's Law, as it's always been: good software drives out the bad. (Not that, say, Windows or Mac OS are any better than Unix, no... but there have been many other OSs which, despite being technically superior to Unix offerings, were deprecated for other reasons. This process was very similar to what's happening nowadays to the corporate environment, with Micro$oft's relentless push towards WinNT.)
Unix itself may not be what's so wonderful, but the fact that there is a platform with standards behind it (POSIX) that allows programmers to write once and port many ways may be what's so wonderful.
I have two things to say about that: (1) There have been standards before POSIX. (2) POSIX imposes the Unix worldview upon the programmer, and therefore constrains and hinders the system engineer's freedom to make something better out of the OS. Otherwise, no objections.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Gresham's Law states, in fact, that bad software drives out the good, not the other way around. Sorry.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I think you can find horrific flaws in anything if you try hard enough...
Unix isn't perfict and in many cases a diffrent operating system dose the job better...
But for any "perfict operating system" I will find you flaws...
Linux advocacy over Windows is often a bit overstated. "World domination" is a gole that will NEVER happen for Linux. It's a target.. nothing more.. Like when you puch you aim PAST the target... When you run a race you don't slow down untill you cross the finish line. World domination... a goal well byond what Linux advocates want..
What dose urk me is some times people turn and attack Linux becouse Linux is the WRONG os for them. Instead of going after Microsoft.. Instead of targetting world domination themselfs...
Apple has a game plan and Linux has a game plan they both are after that "total market" goal.
I personally use Linux however when I threaton to buy a computer for my lady friend I threaton to buy her a Mac. Ok I occasionally threaton to install Linux on it but she knows I am joking about that...
A perfict os.. find an operating system that protects everything drives everything controlls everything and dosn't let any application take over the system and at the same time lets any given application take over the system.. all while not slowing the system down...
Dose EVERYTHING and dosn't do anything that is unnessisary. Every posable feature automaticly available with out confusing the user. Dosn't crash isn't big uses minimal procesing power runs on an 8 bit chip while being a 64 bit os...
I think you get the idea... some things are simply imposable.
With Unix everything is a file.. with Mac everything is an Icon.. other operating systems have there own style. Each is ideal for SOME things but in no way works for everything.
Why not talk about how BeOS or MacOs could beat Microsoft? Well there is this small issue that it dosn't translate into action...
Linux is a big community effor.. so is BSD.. MacOs and BeOS are property and I assure you that the same "how do we crush Microsoft" chats on Slashdot are going on at Apple and Be Inc.
I don't actually exist.
Heh - maybe this shows that I'm just a youngin' but I find it funny that the UNIX system can support 'high-level "C" languages'. Oooh! Ahhh! :)
OK since when did a programming language actually matter?
Since the dawn of time. Say what you want, a given system's design and architecture always end up reeking of its language of choice. So it was with any of the "ancient" platform-based OSs and their related assembly languages. So it is with Unix and C. (So it is with BeOS and C++ too.) This is not only not a Bad Thing, it's also unavoidable; the language you program with has a definite effect on the way you program and build systems.
In fact, a properly reflective environment will enforce no distinction between the system level and the language level; in systems such as Squeak, Native Oberon, DrScheme and even OpenGenera (the descendant of the Genera OS which ran on Symbolics' Lisp Machines), the language and OS are fully entertwined, therefore giving the programmer total and complete freedom (not to mention increasing performance and architectural simplicity).
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
St. Joe's.. Cracked skull from a fall onto concrete.. I spent a whole lot of time in bed with an Atari 400 on my lap and a 300 baud rubber cup modem connection to a Unix box. I think I wrote my first few C programs, a primitive calendar program that was freindly to my teletype and a videogame kind of like Zork during that period, but my memory is more than a wee bit foggy. (I wasn't yet four)
.sig: Now legally binding!
Just looking at the front panel switches (after 20 years!) my fingers felt this urge to key in the boot loader ....
>No, I equated the average Unix supporter to someone who will slam me without reason. I have found this to be the case, in general
I find the avrage (insert person class) is a decent person and at worse a human being.
Something my sister showed me.. People NEVER slam with out reason. It may not be a good reason but there is a reason.
>(2) POSIX imposes the Unix worldview upon the programmer,
You find me an operating system that dosn't impose a "single world view"...
No operating system is a utopia... The fewer restrictions the fewer features... The more features the more restrictions.
To code with no restrictions at all what so ever... break out a rom burnner...
I don't actually exist.
You must have forgot to include the link to the superior operating system you wrote. Probably just a simple mistake.
I find the avrage (insert person class) is a decent person and at worse a human being.
;)
Well, I should hope so!--- or do you know something about the impending invasion of the large-brained giant squid that I don't?
Something my sister showed me.. People NEVER slam with out reason. It may not be a good reason but there is a reason.
Of course there is a reason. But it may be that they're wrong. (Yes, despite the best efforts of postmodernists everywhere, there still is such a thing as being just plain wrong.) And that is the case all too often - you can be an entirely decent person and still be wrong. (Story of my life... heh.)
You find me an operating system that dosn't impose a "single world view"...
But POSIX isn't an operating system, it's a standard. And standards are supposed to allow implementation on diverse and heterogeneous platforms, which of course POSIX doesn't. Case in point: QNX. Go look at it and then come talk to me about POSIX's effect on the system engineer's freedom.
No operating system is a utopia...
Yes, so?
The fewer restrictions the fewer features... The more features the more restrictions. To code with no restrictions at all what so ever... break out a rom burnner...
That's just completely untrue. If you bother to take a look at systems such as Oberon or Squeak, you'll find that they're both very feature-full and completely unrestrictive, in that their reflective design allows the programmer to tap into the controls of the environment itself and turn off any restrictions which may be enforced by default. That is freedom. (And it can be even better - we're working on it, anyways.)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
What i Would like to see is the first ad for a linux product!!
(Who Was First!)
cm.bell-labs.com is running Plan9
Then again, if anybody's going to know how to play tricks with identifying a Unix system by its TCP stack, I'm guessing it's dmr... :-]
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
If you worked in computers back then, you'd realize this was a fairly impressive number. It meant as maybe 50,000 people or more had accounts on Unix machines. And in '81 terms 50K users was a huge number.
81 was really was a cusp. The exponential growth of computer technology had been going on for some time, but in absolute terms it hadn't amounted to much outside of large research labs and corporate data centers. The first Intel processor capable of handling a decent OS was four years away; the 68K was available then, but I don't know if the PMMU had shipped yet; the first 68K based Unix boxes I remember were circa 1983. We had ten programmers working on that box, which was in processing terms about the same speed and memory as a palm pilot.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I wonder if they would send out some literature?
Ideology is for ideots.
In college at Berkeley. I was whacking Pascal on a PDP-11 for CS classes. I guess that was also about the time I was using front panel switches to toggle data into a PDP-11/10 (or was it a 11/7) for the assembly language programming course. Those were the days :-)
Yeah, my favorite right now (and you don't even have to be at -1!) is OOG. If not for the content, then for watching the moderators fall over themselves trying to moderate the posts one way or the other.
--GnrcMan--
See Windows 2000 Terminal Services and welcome to the 1970's.
Commodore 64s are the best systems out. they only need a 386 to run their tcp/ip stack
I'm now finishing my third year of my Computer Science degree. In our second year, we studied PDP-11 (in one course) for a full term. I can program machine code (zeros and ones) on the PDP-11. The rest of my class can also do this. Man, the PDP-11 was the most amazing chip (or so it seamed).
Flat memory model
Orthogonal instruction set
Those were the days. I went in knowing how to code x86 assembly, by the time I was done, I couldn't read it anymore.
Are there any modern chips out that have an orthogonal instruction set and a flat memory model that can do 64bit integer operations? I would dearly love to play with such a beast.
Eunuchs maybe?
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
Remember when Usenet primarily ran over UUCP on 1200 baud modems?
;)
We called 'em !200 baud modems around here
--fatboy
dude, you have no sense of humor (and neither does that kaufmann guy). you might want to actually look at the damn link before spouting off. BTW, the UNIX haters handbook was written by people who contributed significantly to UNIX itself..heres a clue - dennis ritchie contributed to the book as did programmers who worked on the solaris NeWs system, NeXT and others. and moderators - that applies to you too. man...i dont believe i got moderated down for posting a link to the handbook.
I know what you mean and I really wish that TUNES was anything more than a lot of hot air... but at this point in time, for me, Linux (and FreeBSD) suck the least.
And I'm sure that (list Windows Mac Be) suck the least for other people.
I just don't see your point of trying to abash us Unix fans because it isn't theoretically perfect. We are not impressed nor are we suddenly ashamed and enlightened.
It's like shouting "Ferraris are better" at a VW Beetle fan club convention. Sure it's an air-cooled piece of crap that goes faster uphill if you push it... but it gets us where we're going and we can take it apart and put it back together all by ourselves with a basic toolkit.
We just glance up and mutter, "What an asshole," and then get back to work.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
>But POSIX isn't an operating system, it's a standard.
True.. Unix systems are free to ignore posix.
This isn't without problems and most feel the advanages of a standard are far greater than the disadvantages...
I have writen multiplatform code with out the benifit of Posix.
This one example dosn't change much...
I know there are many points where Posix fails...
I can code around thies problems.
With Posix I don't allways need to worry about this.
Or if I wish I can allways write Linux only code. This option is not taken from me by Posix.
>If you bother to take a look at systems such as Oberon or Squeak, you'll find that they're both very feature-full and completely unrestrictive
If you can change EVERYTHING then I know ONE feature you'll NEVER have....
Consistency.. with out this writing code is a nightmare...
This is why Posix was created in the first place..
>Of course there is a reason. But it may be that they're wrong.
True... They may be blindly classifying you as wrong... Or you may be doing exactly the same to them...
It allmost allways makes me wonder when a person proclames a larg body of people to be wrong...
"3,000 people cann't be wrong" of course they can...
However normally a larg body of people comming up with the same answer are at least close to the truth.
There are occasions when a larg body of people are absolutly wrong.. in such a case there is a cause for this. Be it floating myths bad TV reporting lead poisoning in the water, coverup or marketting.
There are many ways to make a larg body not think for themselfs...
I don't believe any of them apply to this situation
I don't actually exist.
If the site isn't especially new, it may already be mirrored at Google.
Will I retire or break 10K?
dude, you have no sense of humor (and neither does that kaufmann guy).
;)
Sure I do. I just happen to think that Unix does, in fact, suck - and I did so long before I found the Handbook. I've spoken to at least one of the authors in length, and he also thinks that Unix sucks. So, it seems to be a consensus... after all, why do you think Ritchie and the gang have left Unix for Plan 9?
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
You are a hard man to debate...
This is a good thing...
Your arguments are hard to challange...
Your challanges are hard to dispute..
Thank you for your thoughts and ideas...
I don't actually exist.
>But POSIX isn't an operating system, it's a standard.
True.. Unix systems are free to ignore posix.
This isn't without problems and most feel the advanages of a standard are far greater than the disadvantages...
Boy, miss the point yet again, will you?!?
>If you bother to take a look at systems such as Oberon or Squeak, you'll find that they're both very feature-full and completely unrestrictive
If you can change EVERYTHING then I know ONE feature you'll NEVER have....
Consistency.. with out this writing code is a nightmare...
This is why Posix was created in the first place..
That's a logical fallacy if I ever saw one. Customisation and flexibility do not necessarily imply lack of consistency. Any programmer can write code for Squeak and be assured that it'll run flawlessly on any Squeak system - yes, even if the user of said system has decided to completely change his environment. This works thanks to clever use of metaobjects. Remember, just because Unix does it the brain-damaged way doesn't mean there's no other way to do it.
"3,000 people cann't be wrong" of course they can...
However normally a larg body of people comming up with the same answer are at least close to the truth.
That's an absurd statement. It's only even marginally true when the truth happens to somehow match the mixture of common-sense and popularly diffused ideology that the populace tends to believe at any given time. Even within the IT field, which is supposed to be made up of smart(er) people, at any given time the general consensus about just about anything is just plain wrong.
There are many ways to make a larg body not think for themselfs...
I don't believe any of them apply to this situation
Oh, please. The modern IT field is a fucking paradigm of social dynamics gone bad. You've got your clueless masses, your bunch of evil conspiracies, your even larger bunch of not-particularly-evil but still self-interested parties; you've got your ruthless manipulation of the general opinion throughout whatever means necessary, your "keep 'em in the dark" philosophy, your FUD wars... et cetera et al, ad infinitum. Considering this, you mean to tell me that you really expect that the widespread adoption of Unix in this midst is any more driven by reason and straight-headed economics than the widespread adoption of Microsoft software? Bah.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I just don't see your point of trying to abash us Unix fans because it isn't theoretically perfect. We are not impressed nor are we suddenly ashamed and enlightened.
:)
You're not supposed to be - it's just meant to get people off their high horses. "Unix sucks" is first and foremost a direct reaction to "Unix rules". There are just so many people who believe with all their heart that Unix is the Second friggin' Coming that I just can't help but play devil's advocate; indeed, for some people, Unix (or whatever) may suck the least, but there's a huge leap between that and the "non-Unixers are lusers" feeling.
So, in conclusion... Unix sucks!!!!
P.S.: I fail to understand how you can be an Unix fan. Please clarify.
P.P.S.: Tunes is more than a lot of hot air. The thing is, it's a hugely ambitious project, not to mention very vague. However, even as we speak, there's a lot of effort being put into Slate, a proposed high-level language to be used to bootstrap Tunes. (Well, two people working in their spare time doesn't really qualify as "a lot of effort", but they're two very good computer scientists - Brian Rice and Lee Salzman -, and it's better than nothing, eh?)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
/ k.d / earth trickle / Monkeys vs. Robots Films /
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/picture.h
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
Of course, even 20 timeshared users for tens of thousands of $$ would be a big deal when the mainframes STARTED at $1M.... and actually I think USL paid around $250K for their Vax 780, complete with two of the big 500Mb drives. That was more storage space than their $6M mainframe had at the time!
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
are these the only good reasons to use C?
No, these are the only good reasons for the Tunes project to adopt C/C++.
if C/C++ are that bad, why didn't everyone switch to lisp or something else?
"If COBOL is that bad, why didn't everyone switch to Ada or something else?"
"If WinNT is that bad, why didn't everyone switch to Linux or something else?"
Et cetera et al. Ad populum - as I was explaining to Felinoid, the general consensus is wrong very often. People are using C/C++ for a variety of reasons - very few of which really represent valid technical points, IMAO.
the people at tunes.org are trying to invent a language for use with their OS. Is this a very smart idea? why would anyone want to include some sort of lisp interpreter inside the OS?
You've missed the point of Tunes. It intends to go even beyond - to break the barriers between system and application, environment and program, programmer and user, OS and language. It intends to build a foundation so that your system can be anything you want it to be, so that you have full computing freedom. In short, we want to integrate our language and our OS, and be able to change them both at will, from within themselves. If you read further into the Tunes pages, you'll find a lot more information explaining why this is actually a Good Thing.
isn't it a bit weird to invent a language to suit your OS?
I don't know... the Bell Labs gang seem very fond of it... case in point: Unix and C, Inferno and Limbo... et cetera.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
The Motorola 68000 was similar to the PDP-11 in its addressing modes and memory model, but it had that funky divide between data registers and address registers. For example, to do an indexed read off a pointer to an array, you'd load the pointer into an address register (like A1), then you'd load the offset into a data register (like D1), then
move (A1)[D1],D0
(the above is not the 68000 assembler's format, BTW, it's been too long :=-( ).
Anyhow, even with that address/data register split, it was still head and shoulders above the (blech) 8086. But the one I really wanted to get my hands on was the ?NCR?AMD??? 32032, there was a big write-up in Byte Magazine on the chipset and it made me slobber (even if I can't remember who made the stupid chip!). Had a MMU that implemented true paged virtual memory, had a symmetric instruction set that greatly resembled a VAX, etc... this was right after Motorola introduced the 68000, which had no MMU and thus really wasn't well suited for Unix. Unfortunately, the maker of the chip never managed to ship them in volume or with adequate performance. Kind of the same story as with Zilog and the Z8000, making microprocessors back then was a lot of hand-drawing masks and stuff, and many of the old-line companies just couldn't scale their design process to the "new" 16-bit microprocessors. Probably the only reason Motorola managed the 68000 was because they gave up and microcoded most of the instructions, and even then, the 68000 was late to market and thus missed the IBM design win (because IBM needed something available right then and there, and the 8088 was "good enough"). I still think we would be better off if Motorola had beat Intel to market... even the Pentium III and Xeon suffers from a serious lack of available processor registers (makes GCC's optimizer make aweful noises and die messily from time to time -- ask the kernel guys about all the work-arounds they've had to do when the optimizer craps on their code). One thing you could not accuse the 68000 of was a shortage of registers (it had 16 -- 8 address and 8 data, though 2 of the address registers were reserved for stack and program counter, and 1 of the address registers was usually used as an offset to the current stack frame).
_E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Must have been a slow news day.
spam, spam, spam, spam, e-mail, news and spam.
I fail to understand how you can be an Unix fan. Please clarify.
What the hell? I just told you. I like it, OK? Like some people like VW Beetles or Chevy Novas and others like old Godzilla movies. Talk about your high horses...
You need to lighten up, it's just a damn operating system.
And no I'm not one of those people that think Unix is the second coming, but it's a lot of fun for me and a lot of other people. It's a hobby for many of us and it happens to do a pretty good job of getting real work done (I can feel a snide response to that statement coming but don't even bother).
Is that all right with you? Do I have your permission to use Unix without being called an idiot? Perhaps you could point out some alternative operating systems that suck less and have the huge library of useful software that I'm accustomed to?
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
Just kidding, Rob, Hemos, etc...
Free music from Jack Merlot.
I happened to be working on a oil drilling rig in Wyoming. Yep, no computers, pagers, cell phones, NT servers, UNIX, or anything else remotely geeky. I was, however, covered in oil much of the time, which does wonders for your skin (think MONDO zits...). It was truly an enlightening experience.
Dive Gear
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
Wait... dose Squeak have any of the features I asked for?
Becouse it seems to me your talking about an operating system with a very nice configurable interface.
Cool... but that's not what I asked for.. not in the slightest...
I asked for an operating system that has a list of conflicting features.
It seems now your talking about an operating system that has NONE of them.
I ask... Can Squeak grant apps total control AND prevent apps fron asserting any control?
Now.. if yes... when an app attempts to assert control when the operating sytem is set to prevent it what happends?
The application eather dose not work.. or the protection is bypased.
>Oh, please. The modern IT field is a fucking paradigm of social dynamics gone bad.
Yes I am well aware...
There are a lot of problems...
A much older problem is people running around with unique ideas that don't work and refuse to lissen to anyone who tells them they are wrong prefering instead to believe they alone are correct.
It is remarkably unlikely one person knows better than everyone else.
I don't actually exist.
I used Squeak as an example of a system which, despite being extremely featureful, still managed to maintain consistency, which you claimed to be impossible.
And no, Squeak is not just "an operating system with a very nice configurable interface"; it's a very nice configurable operating system, period. See the distinction?
A much older problem is people running around with unique ideas that don't work and refuse to lissen to anyone who tells them they are wrong prefering instead to believe they alone are correct.
It is remarkably unlikely one person knows better than everyone else.
... but our ideas do work, you see. They just aren't widely accepted for other, non-technical reasons. That is the schtick.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Good God. I was just asking. I just figured that a person who thought that "Unix sucked the least" would use it for the sake of practicality, but not be an Unix fan. After all, as you said, it is just a damned operating system - I don't really understand how people get attached to operating systems anyway... That's all. Maybe you need to lighten up too...
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
You know, this thing deserves to be saved.
But since it's offtopic everywhere, I'm not sure how to do it.
Instead of moderating it up, I'm going to say, "Nice job" and lose my ability to moderate it at all. Only makes sense.
D
----
I wonder what kind of information you get from bell labs if you send in the reply card.
WRCT Pittsburgh, 88.3FM
Plan 9 strikes me as "more Unix then Unix". Everything is a file. Everything. No more ioctl, or fcntl, just have a few extra "control devices". (I know, you put the smiley there, but I had to respond....)
My big problem with the Unix Haters Handbook, is not that they hate Unix. I rather hate parts of it too. It's just that the whole seems to be better then all the other stuff that is out there, at least that I can get!
My beef with it, is that while it did discribe Unixs failings (and sometimes things I didn't think of as failings) at great length, it seldom described a system that did it better. It did for error messages (I think it liked the VMS error system), and it did for a hand full of other things, but for less then half.
To me that just makes it a bitch session. Which is fine if that's what you want. I would rather have something point me at a "right way", something for Unix to grow, or at least something to pine for that can't be retrofitted. I woulnd't buy a book telling me my car sucked because it only has a 190HP engine. I might buy one if it told me how other componies managed a 240HP engine in the same space. At least if I were mechanically inclined ;-)
(and yes, I have the tunes project page up in another window, that looks more intresting then the UHB)
First off, you're stretching it including Squeak and Oberon as OS/Language systems. But be that as it may...
Isn't that what Multics was trying to do with PL/I? Even then, I don't know that it necessarily *has* to be that way. It's sort of an ivory-towerish view: one must eat one's own dogfood, all the time, every time.
I had a conversation recently with someone with some very strong opinions about programming languages (I'm doing a bit of a language project myself at the moment trying to create an applications language in Klingon) and he made the point that a lot of Lisp Machine enthusiasts feel that they got screwed by the Unix crowd. His thing was that Lisp was purely engineered away from actual user experience and therefore is too pure for its own good. Putting aside for a moment whether this is actually a legitimate criticism (which it is in the case of Scheme, but may not be for Common Lisp), he has a good point in the abstract. Ideals exist for a reason, but they're not always very practical.
Unix is the way it is because it works. EVERYTHING is a component, and the plumbing is designed mostly to be human-readable. Unix is not intentionally an elegant system; it is hacks laid on hacks in such a way as to get the job done as efficiently as possible. Why short, cryptic names for commands? Not everyone's a good typist. Why pipes? Interface metaphors before anyone did any research on them.
If you like pretty, there's plenty of pretty out there. I don't knock Smalltalk-80 or Genera or any of those other environments, but in the end you can't shove a technique down someone's throat. The Unix philosophy is "by any means necessary" -- that's why there's so many Perl junkies out there, for example. Pretty is great. It allows someone to take pride in their work and to show off what they're really capable off. The problem with pretty is that it forces your users to think like you. If it's a lousy fit your users won't touch it.
I mentioned my Klingon programming language earlier. I'm writing it in Perl. Why? Because Perl is very openended about what it can do. I get tokenizing almost for free using split() (there are some issues regarding string parsing that I'm ignoring at the moment). There are no perl style police, so I can write my code as slack as I want (and it's pretty slack, believe me) and nobody will care unless I need to speed it up or cut down on memory usage. Someone with a more purist view would probably want me to go with lex'n'yacc, or even write a recursive descent parser, or even do the whole damn thing in assembler (it's rather forthy in style). But Perl works for me. It's not pure (if you've ever read the Llama book even Larry Wall admits in the intro that it's a crufty mess), it's not pretty, but it works.
So as for architectural simplicity, yes. Increased performance is entirely dependent on the implementor, but I suspect it has nothing to do with tying OS to language. But total freedom... not in the least. Look at it this way: you can write a haiku about anything, but if it doesn't have seventeen syllables it's not really a haiku, is it?
/Brian
OK. You're right. I've lightened up now.
I do use it for the sake of practicality, but I also have fun with it. Personally, I think the "everything is a file", "programs should be lightweight filters that do one thing and do it well", and "use plain text whenever possible" paradigms work very well.
I will, however, admit that C sucks (compared to the Lisp dialects especially) and I would love to have a system such as the one outlined by the TUNES project.
Peace out.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
well of course the B6700 I was refering to was in NZ (at Otago) .... and back then a $NZ was worth more than a $US .... sigh
I think the reason for the man & dollars are obvious. If you use Unix, you won't have people & money sucked up by the 'big' machine. (IBM of course at that time). Whaddya think?
You shall know The TRUTH, and THE TRUTH will set you free.