Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nuchat!sugar!peter From: peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: The GNU Manifesto Message-ID: <1789@sugar.UUCP> Date: 2 Apr 88 04:00:51 GMT References: <153@mozart.UUCP> <1351@sugar.UUCP> <9591@tekecs.TEK.COM> <10106@stb.UUCP> Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX Lines: 79 In article <10106@stb.UUCP> michael@stb.UUCP (Michael) writes: > In article <1393@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes: > >[that UNIX is too big, look how small V7 was] Before I start, I'm going to note that I'm not saying that Version 7 is the be-all and end-all of UNIX. But it is interesting that although System V is many times as large it really doesn't have much more than V7... certainly nothing that couldn't be added to V7 with a little bit of work, and a lot less code. > Yes, version 7. Let me talk to you about version 7. Please do. I've had a lot of good times with it, and I'm always ready to reminisce... There is a lot more stuff in System V, but I really don't see that the standard should be defined so that people who can't afford a couple of grand worth of hardware should be shut out of UNIX. I'm also not saying that we should be using V7. I'm just saying that the baseline standard for UNIX should be implementable, efficiently and effectively, in no more space. > 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. I don't see that the System V terminal driver is really that much better. It still doesn't support any sort of good command line editing, and it's still a royal pain to set the terminal modes the way they should be. It's a lot more complex, of course, and just about everyone has to be told about how to set up c_cc[VMIN] and c_cc[VTIME] correctly. One offhand reference in the body of the text in termio(5) doesn't cut it. > 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. Named pipes are an advance, I'll give you that. In fact for my money they are the advance in system V. They don't justify tripling or quadrupling the size of the kernal though. IPC is important, but apart from FIFOs it's just not implemented right. Messages and shared memory are handled by a whole seperate namespace outside the file system. Messages should have been a superset of named pipes, and shared memory should have been either special files a-la Xenix or by file mapping a-la VMS. Having everything in the file system *was* one of UNIX's big advantages. > 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 really missed CSH when I was using V7, but SH is still a vast improvement over COMMAND.COM, CLI, and whatever the command line interpreter for CP/M was called. Version 7 is a great advance over MS-DOS, which is what most people will still be using for some years yet. Wny? because UNIX has grown far beyond it's needs. > I'd say a MINIMUM workable UN*X based system is a version 7 kernel, with... [ a lot of stuff that isn't in the low-end competition either ]. > 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. Really? I find I'm a lot more productive on my Amiga than on a dumb terminal connected to a System V machine. Windows make up for a multitude of sins. The internals, though... I'll take the UNIX file system over Tripos any day. I'd hate to have to run System V on my poor little Amy, though. It's only a few times faster than the LSI-11s that I used to use V7 on, after all. -- -- Peter da Silva `-_-' ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter -- Disclaimer: These U aren't mere opinions... these are *values*.