Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!think.com!rpi!uupsi!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.os.misc Subject: Re: UNIX vs. the world (again) (was: Compilation listing from Sun ...) Message-ID: Date: 19 Jun 91 14:30:14 GMT References: <1991Jun15.143436.5574@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <25791@lanl.gov> Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 72 In article <25791@lanl.gov> jlg@cochiti.lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes: > Nope. That's an after effect. The _reason_ UNIX became popular was for > no _technical_ advantage at all. It became popular because, at a critical > time in the 70's, it was _free_ and _open_ and avalable on the _cheapest_ > useful hardware: PDP-8/11 and VAXen. Jim, you don't help your argument by making major technical blunders. UNIX has never run on a PDP-8. It ran on the PDP-11, and the earliest ports were actually to other 16-bit minicomputers like the Interdata. The VAX at that time was *not* a cheap machine. But what has made *commercial* versions of UNIX popular is because it's the first widely available O/S (and there are other machine independent systems... I luckily avoided a chance at working on one in COBOL in 1979) to have a simple API. There are no more than 35 system calls that define the behaviour of the UNIX kernel... which is a major breakthrough. The programmer's reference manual fit in one volume! Amazing! Sure, it has technical limitations. But these are correctable. The basic design is sound. > I would agree _if_ the common environment showed _any_ quality in its > design or implementation. The basic design of the *interface* that is the real core of UNIX is realy quite good. The implementations have not always been up to the same quality, though some of the weirder design decisions do seem in retrospect not quite so bad: compare the performance of V7 with MINIX: they both have the same API, but MINIX's single-threaded filesystem really hurts multitasking disk I/O. An *efficient* message-passing kernel is a far more complex beast. > The _same_ argument could be advanced in favor of _any_ portable system. > So why do we have to stick with the _first_ one that became portable? We didn't. The first one was Forth. > I'm not aware of any other system on micros > which requires full-time employees - one per few-dozen machines or so - > to be "system administrators" like UNIX does. I don't know of any other system on micros that provides usable multiuser support. I know that multiuser MS-DOS environments (netyworks) do require full-time support. I also know that our other multiuser systems here at Ferranti (VAXes and Sperry mainframes) require as much support... and don't get anywhere near the variety of users. The main problem with your workstation, if it's at all typical, is that it's running a version of UNIX that has had no work on improving the system administration side of things in 10 years. It's a BSD-based system, right? Probably a Sun. We have a couple of those, and they're nightmares compared to our modern System V, or even our older System III, based systems. Yes, your DOS PC doesn't require as much support, so long as you just leave it in isolation. But then it doesn't do much. > If you > "administer" your own machine, it takes a higher percentage of your > time than any other micro system I've seen (or, so I understand from > friends of mine that do so). How is this an advantage? Try administering a DOS network some time. We have as many people working to support our PCs as all our Xenix systems combined... and they have far fewer users. Excuse me... I have to go install some networking software on a DOS PC. This will be about the fourth attempt, and I don't expect it to work. I may have to go back to an earlier version of the network, because I can't upgrade it to the latest version of DOS because other software on the system won't support it. -- Peter da Silva; Ferranti International Controls Corporation; +1 713 274 5180; Sugar Land, TX 77487-5012; `-_-' "Have you hugged your wolf, today?"