Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!uwvax!rutgers!psuvax1!burdvax!bpa!cbmvax!vu-vlsi!devon!stb!michael From: michael@stb.UUCP (Michael) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: The GNU Manifesto Message-ID: <10106@stb.UUCP> Date: 27 Mar 88 08:18:00 GMT References: <153@mozart.UUCP> <1351@sugar.UUCP> <9591@tekecs.TEK.COM> <1393@sugar.UUCP> Reply-To: michael@stb.UUCP (Michael) Organization: STB BBS, La, Ca, Usa, +1 213 459 7231 Lines: 45 In article <1393@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes: >UNIX is way too bloated. Let me tell you a story... once upon a time there was >a good little operating system named Version 7... > >-- Peter da Silva `-_-' ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter >-- Disclaimer: These U aren't mere opinions... these are *values*. Yes, version 7. Let me talk to you about version 7. The terminal driver was woefully incomplete. You just could not do things with it that you needed; too many things were bundled up and not seperatable. Xenix version 7 had some undocumented things to improve it, but it really took the sys3/5 terminal driver to get it good. Two program want to talk to each other? Fine. Use files. Not named pipes, files. Big, disk space eating (no chsize() or truncate() calls) real files. No message passing. The utility programs supplied. Ah, now we see why it only took a few megs to install version 7 (I've run it on a 12 meg hard disk, so I know it doesn't take much). Whats supplied generally works nice, but all those extra's that weren't there. No Vi, csh, more, strings, etc. If you're on a xenix system, try 'fgrep Berkeley */*' in the manual directory, and see how many utilities came from the BSD releases after version 7. I'd say a MINIMUM workable UN*X based system is a version 7 kernel, with the sys5 terminal driver (with ALL the array elements seperate, no more duplicating "number of characters" with "end of file"), the xenix "version 7 compatible terminal driver", named pipes, pty's, a stdio library that can let you force stdout non-buffered even to non-tty's (as in "| more" or "| tee"), a message passing IPC mechanism (other than sockets; they stink), and better response for interactive processes (so they don't get swapped out while disk bound programs force their way in memory). Utility programs should include the BSD extras. Note that no such system actually exists; but still, one can always dream. Michael p.s. This isn't to say that V7 was extreamly bad, after all, the user interface beats AmigaDos, even if the internals don't. -- : Michael Gersten uunet.uu.net!ucla-an.ANES\ : ihnp4!hermix!ucla-an!denwa!stb!michael : sdcsvax!crash!gryphon!denwa!stb!michael : "A hacker lives forever, but not so his free time"