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From: joe@jshark.inet-uk.co.uk (Joe Sharkey)
Subject: Re: ENOUGH! Re: BSDI/USL Lawsuit -- More Bad News for Human Beings...
Organization: Individual Network (UK)
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 22:27:08 GMT
Message-ID: <C1A118.2rs@jshark.inet-uk.co.uk>
References: <BZS.93Jan16205935@world.std.com> <1993Jan20.230616.25164@igor.tamri.com> <MIKE.93Jan22144301@cuba.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at>
Lines: 112
In article <MIKE.93Jan22144301@cuba.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at> mike@vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at (Michael Gschwind) writes:
>Wait a moment! Who copied design, algorithms, data structures,... from
>whom? UCB from ATT/USL? Or ATT/USL from ATT? I would think the latter
UCB?
>was the case rather than the fromer!!! Unix as we know it today is a
>UCB product
Sorry..
>SO what we like about UNIX (just some features - some of them
>are pretty outdated and we don't like them any more (eg vi), but
>they were at the time a MAJOR step!):
>
> * written in C ATT
Aren't IBM OS's mainly PL/I? VMS mainly BLISS?
> * Paging BSD
Written many times by many people.
> * Fast File System BSD
Don't have it.
> * Job control BSD
Don't use it - wasn't in V7!
> * csh (just a personal plug ;) BSD
Don't use it - wasn't in V7!
> * IPC/networking/sockets BSD
SysV has it's own version - different.
> * vi (eek - but better than ed) BSD
Better than EMACS, and more common. ed (or sed), of course, is usable
in command files.
> * curses ?BSD?
BSD, I think.
> * lex,yacc ATT
> * sendmail BSD
Ranks with RSX/OS-360/MS-DOS: "user-hostile but can be made to work"
> * dbx ?BSD?
sdb is ok by me! Hey, I *never* need it ;)
> * termcap BSD
>AT&T Unix was a good thing, but for its time - much of the
>improvement, ie. that which made it into a `product' did not come from
>AT&T (Unix got wuite a bit bigger and less elegant in the process - I
>doubt that the inventors would want to be associated with the
>cancerous beast that UNIX is today - for that reason the started out
>anew with Plan9 if I understand things) - and the point where the
>input of AT&T code stopped is easily discernable with the last source
>license UCB took for UNIX - which is way back when, if I understand
>things correctly...
Eh?
BSD grew and grew, taking ideas from wherever: VM, paging, resources...
Plan9 is not based on V.* - also *not* on BSD 4.*.
>From my limited knowledge, BSD (you know, "sockets" and all that) were
rewriting SysV "streams" for BSD 4.4...
>So the people who are writting PD unixes - oops, UNIX is TM - who are
>writting POSIX conformant operating systems are ripping USL off? Isn't
>it more the case that USL is ripping the CS community off by selling a
>system of which they very lttle wrote/invented?
Maybe, maybe not.
It's easier to "clone" a product than to come up with the original idea.
Compare and contrast:
USL has had some original ideas in the last 20 years.
FSF/GNU are copying a de-facto (proprietary) standard
>
>mike
>
>--
>
>Michael Gschwind, Vienna University of Technology
>mike@vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at (*) BOZO is a registered
>(back in Vienna) trademark of Bush/Quayle 92
> (*) UNIX is a registered
> trademark of AT&T
>
--
Joe Sharkey joe@jshark.inet-uk.co.uk ...!uunet!ibmpcug!jshark!joe
150 Hatfield Rd, St Albans, Herts AL1 4JA, UK Got a real domain name
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