6 ms·

> So [RMS] goes back and says lets make this crappy piece of shit operating system called Unix. Its name is a gag. It's a pun too. It's a joke, eunuch, a eunuch

by floren 7y ago

> So [RMS] goes back and says lets make this crappy piece of shit operating system called Unix. Its name is a gag. It's a pun too. It's a joke, eunuch, a eunuch is.... a uh.. So he said lets go and build an open one, he made a system that caught on Not even RMS would attribute the creation of Unix to himself, although I guess maybe this confusion is one of the fruits of his tireless "GNU/Linux" nagging.

msla 7y ago
Right. RMS had nothing to do with the creation of Unix. He was off in the MIT AI Lab back then, working on ITS in a very different culture: He had a nice PDP-10 mainframe running an OS with plenty of creature comforts [1] as opposed to dmr and Ken bumming an outdated PDP-7 minicomputer to hack up something which barely qualifies as multi-user. (PDP-7 Unix supported two users at most!) [1] (The ITS concept of detaching jobs is basically similar to tmux or screen on modern systems, in that you can create a job tree, detach it, log out, and then log back in and reattach it and everything will continue as if nothing happened... assuming nobody killed your jobs. ITS didn't really have a security model.) Even the PDP-11 was underpowered compared to the PDP-10... but the PDP-10 was a dead-end. It was discontinued in favor of the VAX (a PDP-11 extension, hence the name) and attempts to resurrect/continue it (Foonly, for example) came to nothing. RMS got kicked out of his world, his colleagues got swallowed up by the proprietary software world, and he settled on making GNU an extended and improved Unix instead of attempting to port ITS to a workstation with a 68000 CPU and maybe a megabyte of RAM. To RMS, Unix was a good-enough system with a pre-existing userbase, not his ideal platform; the biggest concession to his roots he got was sneaking a real Lisp system (not mocklisp) inside of Emacs. ;) (And he wasn't even the first to write a Lisp Emacs. Greenberg wrote one for Multics.)
- floren 7y ago
  > To RMS, Unix was a good-enough system with a pre-existing userbase, not his ideal platform; the biggest concession to his roots he got was sneaking a real Lisp system (not mocklisp) inside of Emacs. ;) There's also the info command, which appears to be a re-implementation of the online docs system from ITS. It's also an abomination... I have vague memories of a time around 2000 where it seemed like half the man pages for basic utilities were just stubs saying "refer to info" which drove me insane.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
    I always prefer info pages to man pages when available: info zsh or info coreutils has a much more in-depth discussion of the program in question and, if there isn't an info page available, it'll show the man page.
- btilly 7y ago
  To add one more detail to this, in writing Emacs, RMS resisted the trend towards lexical scope, and as a result Emacs got stuck with dynamic scope. Furthermore RMS failed to create a kernel because he believed the micro-kernel hype. But micro-kernels are hard to debug for all of the reasons that micro-services are challenging to scale and debug today if you have failed to create a good toolchain around them. And the result is that by the time that the GNU Hurd was available, most were using Linux and most of the rest were using Free BSD. (One does wonder, however, what would have happened had RMS himself not been crippled by tendonitis. Could he have finished in time for his kernel to be relevant?)
  - fulafel 7y ago
    Emacs supports lexical scope too, since 5 years ago: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Using-Lexical-Binding.html http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Usi...
    - btilly 7y ago
      Yes, it does. Which means that for about 30 years it did not, and a lot of Emacs software still uses dynamic scoping.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
No, but the intent was to create a (clone of) Unix. And he (and his people) got most of the way. They just didn't get the OS kernel, but they got the utilities and the build toolchain.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  Like a math proof, the one who puts the last link in the chain gets the glory (and the proof named after them).
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Well... given how long Mach took, the kernel probably was considerably harder than gcc or bash or the command-line tools.
    - ChickeNES 7y ago
      I think you mean HURD, Mach was from CMU and was used (along with code from BSD) as the underpinnings of XNU, the kernel underlying NeXTStep, MacOS, and iOS.
      - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        D'oh. Yes, HURD.
    - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
      Gnu always adopted other projects where needed. The existence of Linux would have caused the Gnu folks to de-prioritize Hurd. By the time they realized that Linus had a slightly different vision (TiVo) Linux driver support was already pretty good.
pram 7y ago
I think he might actually have intended to refer to the creation of the “POSIX” standard, and got his origin stories confused.
m463 7y ago
> Its name is a gag Hurd is even more of a gag. (hurd/hird)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

by floren 7y ago

msla 7y ago

Right. RMS had nothing to do with the creation of Unix. He was off in the MIT AI Lab back then, working on ITS in a very different culture: He had a nice PDP-10 mainframe running an OS with plenty of creature comforts [1] as opposed to dmr and Ken bumming an outdated PDP-7 minicomputer to hack up something which barely qualifies as multi-user. (PDP-7 Unix supported two users at most!) [1] (The ITS concept of detaching jobs is basically similar to tmux or screen on modern systems, in that you can create a job tree, detach it, log out, and then log back in and reattach it and everything will continue as if nothing happened... assuming nobody killed your jobs. ITS didn't really have a security model.) Even the PDP-11 was underpowered compared to the PDP-10... but the PDP-10 was a dead-end. It was discontinued in favor of the VAX (a PDP-11 extension, hence the name) and attempts to resurrect/continue it (Foonly, for example) came to nothing. RMS got kicked out of his world, his colleagues got swallowed up by the proprietary software world, and he settled on making GNU an extended and improved Unix instead of attempting to port ITS to a workstation with a 68000 CPU and maybe a megabyte of RAM. To RMS, Unix was a good-enough system with a pre-existing userbase, not his ideal platform; the biggest concession to his roots he got was sneaking a real Lisp system (not mocklisp) inside of Emacs. ;) (And he wasn't even the first to write a Lisp Emacs. Greenberg wrote one for Multics.)

floren 7y ago
> To RMS, Unix was a good-enough system with a pre-existing userbase, not his ideal platform; the biggest concession to his roots he got was sneaking a real Lisp system (not mocklisp) inside of Emacs. ;) There's also the info command, which appears to be a re-implementation of the online docs system from ITS. It's also an abomination... I have vague memories of a time around 2000 where it seemed like half the man pages for basic utilities were just stubs saying "refer to info" which drove me insane.
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  I always prefer info pages to man pages when available: info zsh or info coreutils has a much more in-depth discussion of the program in question and, if there isn't an info page available, it'll show the man page.
btilly 7y ago
To add one more detail to this, in writing Emacs, RMS resisted the trend towards lexical scope, and as a result Emacs got stuck with dynamic scope. Furthermore RMS failed to create a kernel because he believed the micro-kernel hype. But micro-kernels are hard to debug for all of the reasons that micro-services are challenging to scale and debug today if you have failed to create a good toolchain around them. And the result is that by the time that the GNU Hurd was available, most were using Linux and most of the rest were using Free BSD. (One does wonder, however, what would have happened had RMS himself not been crippled by tendonitis. Could he have finished in time for his kernel to be relevant?)
- fulafel 7y ago
  Emacs supports lexical scope too, since 5 years ago: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Using-Lexical-Binding.html http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Usi...
  - btilly 7y ago
    Yes, it does. Which means that for about 30 years it did not, and a lot of Emacs software still uses dynamic scoping.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

No, but the intent was to create a (clone of) Unix. And he (and his people) got most of the way. They just didn't get the OS kernel, but they got the utilities and the build toolchain.

quickthrower2 7y ago
Like a math proof, the one who puts the last link in the chain gets the glory (and the proof named after them).
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Well... given how long Mach took, the kernel probably was considerably harder than gcc or bash or the command-line tools.
  - ChickeNES 7y ago
    I think you mean HURD, Mach was from CMU and was used (along with code from BSD) as the underpinnings of XNU, the kernel underlying NeXTStep, MacOS, and iOS.
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      D'oh. Yes, HURD.
  - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
    Gnu always adopted other projects where needed. The existence of Linux would have caused the Gnu folks to de-prioritize Hurd. By the time they realized that Linus had a slightly different vision (TiVo) Linux driver support was already pretty good.

pram 7y ago

I think he might actually have intended to refer to the creation of the “POSIX” standard, and got his origin stories confused.

m463 7y ago

> Its name is a gag Hurd is even more of a gag. (hurd/hird)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]